A good portion of our class time has been spent on Hegel's notions of family and community. In the Sittlichkeit, Hegel illustrates the components that make up the whole - individual, family, and community. The community's citizenry is governed by human law, while the family is governed by divine law. Within the family, the relationship between brother and sister becomes the model through which citizens join the ethical life. The brother and sister, as equals and unfettered by desire for each other, shape and prepare one another for adult life. The sister becomes the ultimate individual and maintains the divine law in the home, while the brother, in exiting the home, enters the community and the governance of human law. Hegel shows the limitations of this model in the moments of conflict between the two laws, however, there are other nagging questions.
Hegel's family leaves no room for variation - this obviously poses problems when one tries to move outside of the husband/wife, brother/sister example given. Are we limiting our observations to only these types of families? What happens in a family with a brother but no sister? This relationship is central to the roles and development of citizens, and it has a very clear dialectic in the antithesis and synthesis of the two siblings. However, the determination of its components seems strange, since it is in no way representative of all families, and ignores any other family make-ups. There doesn't seem to be a clear way out, but then again Hegel offers a specific model of the way things are ideally - the workings of ethical life in its most perfect realization. Maybe it doesn't make sense to think of these ideas as being representative of, or corresponding, to an actual community or society.
Throughout the section on ethical life, Hegel writes of the triumphs of the ethical life over nature. It is the "natural attachment and sentiment" (p. 14) of husband and wife and parent to child that prevents those relationships from being fully reciprocal, or having "in itself its return to itself." The brother/sister relationship is ideal due to the lack of this natural attachment. In the act of burial, one again overcomes nature. Death is "the immediate, natural state of having been," and so the family must bury their dead as sort of a stamp of consciousness, and of citizenry and community - otherwise the dead shall "belong solely to nature and remain something irrational (p. 10)." Nature is, further, blamed for injustices in life which can mess of community up (this is what I think Hegel is saying when he says that "nature is the power that perpetrates upon consciousness the injustice of making it a pure thing [p. 19]").
In the natural, outside of community and law, there is no meaning or rationality. But why, then, should the naturalness of the "antithesis of the two sexes" give any significance to their "ethical determination (p. 16)," as Hegel writes? Why are the sexes limited so rigidly to roles determined naturally, by gender, if a purpose of the ethical life is to give meaning to citizens by trumping nature and its meaningless irrationality?
Well, that part of it can be attributed to the sexism of the time. Philosophers, though they may have been great, are not immune from the thinking that permeates the time and place they live in. In his time women were certainly seen as part of the domestic sphere and were definitely expected to raise future citizens (as they were in ancient Greece). In 1807, when Spirit was written, the majority of women were housewives and mothers and it was thought that this was due to the way nature made them. Allegedly quieter, weaker, more nurturing, etc. It probably never even occurred to Hegel that he contradicted himself by first arguing against nature and then using nature as a justification for one of his theories.
ReplyDeleteAnother objection that occurred to me- Hegel must have never heard of incest because there certainly are some families where the brother and the sister are "fettered by desire" for one another.
@ Ravi
ReplyDeleteBy definition, ethics is moral philospophy and it determines what is right and wrong. I think it is very important for society to have rules and regulations to function in ethicaly moral way. I do agree with @Agatha that at the time when Hegel wrote this book, women were considered to take care of their household chores. Their freedom was limited only to the four walls of their house. Men were considered as the bread winner of the house. Both nature and nurture has a great role for women and men to sustain their role in the society; we can see this concept passed from generation to generation. At that time society was very strict so they may keep their feelings and desires within the closet, if those desires were against the laws of society.
May be Hegel was not aware of other cultures and religion where they marry their first cousin. For Hegel it may be a perfect society where citizens were governed by their morally right principles.