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NEWS & LETTERS, June-July 2006EssayHutchings’ feminism reconsiders Hegel's dialecticby Ron Kelch Hegel and feminist philosophy by Kimberly Hutchings, Cambridge: Blackwell, 2003 Hegel’s dialectic comes to life in Kimberly Hutchings’ HEGEL AND FEMINIST PHILOSOPHY through an engagement with the spectrum of contemporary feminist philosophy. Hutchings guides the reader on a seemingly linear journey, which is actually a complete circle, more easily comprehended, she says, if one is not a participant. Hutchings’ journey is a movement through "generally recognizable trajectories of feminist thought" (p. 12). Such a journey may begin with liberal "rationalist feminists" who challenge women’s lack of freedom in society by comparing all individuals as abstract equal legal entities in liberal democracy. Sexual difference feminists correctly judge that this abstract equality is itself a male bias, which ignores the concrete differences that make women and men unequal and also leaves patriarchy intact in concrete everyday life outside of the political and civil sphere. The alternative for sexual difference feminists is subjectivity rooted in women’s essential natural difference. Postmodern feminists deny any natural essentialism and assert an absolute radical otherness. They counterpose diverse particularity of the individual to any universal notion of the immanent social character of individual existence. Hutchings traces how each tendency criticizes binary oppositions in other tendencies only to fall into their own fixed opposition such as thought versus being, spirit versus nature or individual versus universal. To Hutchings the pattern of this movement displays the "way of despair" Hegel says consciousness goes through on the path toward comprehending the truth as a self-moving unity of the whole. For Hutchings that truth, which Hegel called "Absolute Knowledge," is not the "end of history" but "spirit as the ever changing realm of self-changing intersubjectivity [that] is fundamentally self-determining" (p. 41). From the standpoint of the dialectic of Hegel’s PHENOMENOLOGY OF MIND, Hutchings challenges contemporary theory and its relation to today’s feminist movement. In Hutchings view, this challenge must be very modest because beginning from Hegel’s dialectic runs into a "paradox" that it can create a binary opposition of its own as soon as the philosopher moves beyond a disengaged retrospective and limited goal of comprehension. This self-imposed limitation compels another look at Hegel’s dialectic itself and, in particular, the way Hegel’s dialectic came alive for the Hegelian-Marxist and feminist philosopher Raya Dunayevskaya. That was just when the modern women’s movement emerged and brought a new dimension to our time’s "self-changing intersubjectivity." Hutchings’ closely argued work examines the dialectic’s relation to theory and an actual movement through a return to Simone de Beauvoir’s 1949 THE SECOND SEX. Specifically, Hutchings reexamines Beauvoir’s encounter with Hegel and later feminist reactions to de Beauvoir’s feminist classic. To appreciate Hutchings’ argument, as well as the possibilities opened by beginning from Hegel’s dialectic itself, requires stepping back, as she does, to take a brief look at Hegel’s spirit in two primordial moments in his PHENOMENOLOGY, two moments which have been the foci of many debates in feminist theory. THE MASTER-SLAVE DIALECTIC The first is Hegel’s celebrated master/slave relation, which is the result of a life-and-death struggle between what is often mythically posed as two original, isolated and independent consciousnesses becoming SELF-conscious through the encounter with an "other" from which each demands recognition. Hegel here set the stage for his idea of freedom that moves through human relations and the idea of self that structures those relations. The death of one kills any possibility of recognition for the other. Logically, this hypothetical "first" encounter could lead to the ideal of mutual recognition and respect for the freedom of the other. History, however, did not unfold that way. In actual history, inter-societal contact was the source of the oppressive and distorted human relations of slavery through which a new quest for freedom developed. In the master/slave relation, where one consciousness is the dominating subject and the other submissive object, Hegel makes his famous twist. While it might seem that the master has recognition of his humanity and independence on his side, his consciousness becomes in reality the dependent one, even as the slave, in order to survive, accepts the enslaving idea that shapes both spiritual (social) existence as well as humanity’s relation to nature. The slave, using her mind and body to transform nature, discovers the essential freedom of thought through being totally disciplined, albeit in an absolutely negative manner, by that spiritual existence. The slave’s consciousness as a form of negativity, the discovery of freedom within her own thinking, is the pathway to realizing a self-conscious existence that embodies real freedom and independence through mutual recognition. De Beauvoir, like Hegel, saw freedom as emerging through reciprocal recognition of the freedom of the "other." Beauvoir’s lifetime collaborator was Jean Paul Sartre whose Existentialism rejected an idea of freedom realized through reciprocal recognition. Sartre abstracted freedom from human relations--with each other, with nature and humans’ own natural existence. De Beauvoir’s concept of freedom was still somewhat influenced by this abstracting freedom from humanity’s relation to nature. For de Beauvoir, this meant woman’s quest for full recognition of her humanity has special difficulty because woman’s status as "other" is inextricably tied to the biological function of the reproduction of the species. The pull of biology as a barrier for women led de Beauvoir to the conclusion, as Hutchings puts it, that "women therefore depend on men to recognize their freedom…" (p. 70). This conclusion didn’t sit well with the new assertive and self-certain women’s liberation movement that arose in the turbulent 1960s after THE SECOND SEX. Hutchings maintains that many feminist theories, which emerged out of the movement, drew the misguided conclusion that de Beauvoir was held back due to the influence of Hegel. For Hutchings, the real limiting influence in de Beauvoir was the pull of Existentialism that took Hegel’s life and death struggle as an ahistorical starting point for the process of recognition, passing over Hegel’s view that all historical development of spirit includes within it the biological natural foundation for human life. As Hutchings points out, Hegel says human young comprehend quickly that their very existence depends on learning the accumulated social experience passed on to them through parenting (p. 74). Human experience begins from a foundation where the social and biological are intertwined in an unconscious way through parenting and kinship ties. Ethical society, where social life has yet to fully realize itself in distinction from this natural foundation, is Hegel’s other starting point for the development of spirit, reflected in the ancient Greek tragedy of ANTIGONE by Sophocles. ANTIGONE AND ETHICAL SOCIETY Antigone’s crime is defying her leader, the king Creon, when he orders that the body of Antigone’s brother, who was killed in a rebellion against the state, be left in the open for the vultures. Antigone claims the right to give her kin a proper burial in the name of "the unwritten and unfailing statutes of heaven." Creon brings the force of the new state, personifying a conscious written law, against Antigone. Both come to a tragic end because, according to Hegel, each one acts out of their own one-sided conviction and each is unable to comprehend their ethical dependence on the other. For Hegel, self-conscious ethical society as a whole requires, not the exclusion of the other, but recognition of the mutual dependency of both perspectives. For Hegel, Antigone personified the realm of "divine law" and Creon the realm of "human law." Hutchings questions the way many modern feminists let an immediate negative reaction to this gender differentiation, reflecting an actual moment of ancient Greek society, shape much of their contentious discourse over Hegel’s use of ANTIGONE. Citing H. S. Harris’s interpretation, Hutchings challenges those who criticize Hegel for supposedly assigning the natural arena to women and self-conscious spirit to men by pointing out that both divine and human law shape the sense of being Greek and being a citizen.(1) Both are bound up with nature through kinship ties, including Creon’s inherited position as king. ANTIGONE & HEGEL’S PHILOSOPHY Hegel recognizes Antigone as the self-conscious spokesperson for ethical society’s unconsciously accepted foundation--a whole array of customs and orderly social processes which pre-date the rise of the state and, says Hegel, form the immediate principle of the "life of a free people." This points to another aspect of the tragedy of ANTIGONE, which reaches beyond the ethical, moral arena from which Hutchings argues. This immediate principle has no awareness "of pure individuality on....[its] own account" (PHENOMENOLOGY, Miller trans., p. 214). In a non-egoistic way Antigone stands out as an individual and pays with her life. Both master/slave and ethical society are mere beginnings, which give an intimation of the movement of the whole PHENOMENOLOGY. The movement of the PHENOMENOLOGY goes beyond the moral arena and aims to reach a totally new beginning ("Golgotha" as the death and rebirth of spirit) wherein Hegel’s non-linear dialectic, as a recollection and internalization of the historical process of individuation, can itself make a difference. The dialectic itself becomes the active agent, through which individuals on their "own account" can together realize the freedom of ethical society as a dynamic "CONSCIOUS, self-MEDIATING process" (para. 492). Later, in PHILOSOPHY OF MIND, Hegel designates this as an individualism "...purified of all that interferes with its universalism, i.e., with freedom itself" (para. 481). At the end of PHILOSOPHY OF MIND, Hegel makes his most explicit declaration of the agency of philosophy in realizing freedom: "philosophy appears as the idea of which liberty is the aim, and which is itself the way to produce it" (para. 576). Hutchings doesn’t engage Hegel’s intimations of the way philosophy itself can make a difference but views action as being necessarily a form of judgment of the "moral agent." As "moral agent," all action that challenges existing society breaks up the unity of spirit in relation to a concept of the whole that is given. Philosophy then is caught in what Hutchings calls a "paradox," which she says limits it to the modest aim of observation and comprehension because any action makes a negative judgment that breaks up the whole. Dunayevskaya noted that Hegel himself doesn’t stop at comprehension as the only goal of philosophy but poses, especially in the LOGIC, a new unity of theory and practice in his Absolute Idea that transcends the one-sided "moral agent."(2) Hutchings looks for a solution to the "paradox" of the "moral agent" in Hegel’s PHILOSOPHY OF RIGHT, a work in which Hegel does not return to his concept of the agency of philosophy articulated in the LOGIC and PHILOSOPHY OF MIND. A NEW UNITY OF THEORY AND PRACTICE In the Absolute Idea at the end of the LOGIC, Hegel begins anew from his dialectic itself as he returns to the unity of thought and being from which the LOGIC began, but this time not as an immediate unity but a "mediation of a kind that does not belong to a comprehension by means of thinking." It is, instead, "in general the demand for realization of the Notion, which realization does not lie in the beginning itself, but is rather the goal and the task of the entire further development of cognition" (SCIENCE OF LOGIC, Miller trans., p. 828). Hegel’s new unity of theory and practice turns on the mediation of absolute negativity, or negation of the negation. Absolute negativity becomes itself a new foundation through a negative self-relation FROM WITHIN THE PROCESS OF CHANGE. In other words, implicit in all change is a positive in the negative as the self-determination of the idea of freedom. Without a philosophy of a positive concept of freedom, action can get locked into a mere opposition to what is and keep repeating the despairing cycle of the moral agent. Hegel intimates that the "URGE" of the idea to realize itself through absolute negativity "completes its self-liberation" in the PHILOSOPHY OF MIND (p. 843-4). I believe that Dunayevskaya, like Hutchings, viewed feminism from the perspective of Hegel’s dialectic of the self-moving whole. In her 1973 work, PHILSOPHY AND REVOLUTION, Dunayevskaya included a discussion of the profound reason of the newly emergent women’s liberation movement. But Dunayevskaya, who founded the philosophy of Marxist-Humanism in the U.S., began with Hegel’s dialectic especially in the LOGIC and PHILOSOPHY OF MIND. She titled her first chapter on Hegel’s whole philosophy "Absolute Negativity as New Beginning" in order to stress that only by beginning from Hegel’s dialectic could all the new voices of freedom realize their potential. Dunayevskaya had been thoroughly rooted in Marx’s ideas, which she credits as enabling her, in a 1953 study, to discern, in the structure of Hegel’s permanent self-movement, a new unity of theory and practice, especially in the final syllogisms of PHILOSOPHY OF MIND. From the start Dunayevskaya engaged the many voices of women’s liberation that arose from within and PERSISTED BEYOND the revolutionary 1960s, during which much was oriented around pure activity and first negation. Dunayevskaya challenged both revolutionary theorists as well as activists to see the character of the epoch as the implicit existence of Hegel’s idea of absolute negativity in the movement from practice that is itself a form of theory. Beginning from the view that social movements contain not just negative judgments but the impulse to realize the notion, to realize the positive in the negative as the self-determination of the idea of freedom, Dunayevskaya highlighted the unity in the new diverse voices of the women’s movement as a REASON, which demanded that working out freedom couldn’t wait until after the revolution. Bringing a negative self-relation to the process of change itself by criticizing the Left’s division of labor and gender differentiation, women reached for a total concept of freedom. For Dunayevskaya, the maturity of our age demands that Hegel’s absolute negativity itself be brought to the fore as the foundation for a new freedom for all forces struggling to be whole. A new focus on Hegel’s dialectic itself from within feminism couldn’t be timelier when so much of the prevailing retrogressive ideology turns on trying to negate women as self-determining subjects even as feminism and feminist theory has persisted and grown. The task that remains is, as Marx once put it, to "realize" Hegel’s dialectic in the real life struggle for liberation. Notes (1) Hutchings rightly doesn’t excuse Hegel’s sexism. She points out how in other writings he extends this gender differentiation into his own time when there were already plenty of indications that he should not have done so. (2) Hutchings’ "paradox" of the moral agent is very similar to that of H.S. Harris. For a more direct and detailed examination of this issue, see my article "Harris’s Paradox and Dunayevskaya’s New Beginning: Can Hegel’s Method Shape a New Unity of Theory and Practice," CLIO 32:3 (Spring, 2003), 303-330. |
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