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Hegel and Feminist Philosophy

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Hegel: A Feminist Revision by Kimberly Hutchings (Polity Press) Hegel is a significant reference point for many feminist philosophers and there is already a considerable body of feminist scholarship which engages with Hegel. In Hegel: A Feminist Revision, Hutchings examines the philosophical connections and debates between Hegelian thought and feminist philosophy. However, Hutchings does not simply to catalogue ways in which Hegel figures in different feminist philosophical arguments. Instead Hutchings demonstrates that Hegel's thought has something to contribute to significant philosophical arguments within feminism over sexual difference, epistemology and moral and political theory. The fulfilment of claim clearly requires both the articulation of a particular perspective within feminist philosophy and a specific interpretation of Hegel's thought. Feminist philosophy is not a uniform body of thought and my characterization of feminist debates will reflect a perspective which some feminist philosophers would want to reject. Similarly, Hutchings' interpretation of Hegel is a contestable, left-Hegelian one with which other feminist philosophers and Hegelian scholars will find plent to contest This means that the persuasiveness of any of the arguments in Hegel: A Feminist Revision depends on the extent to which readers recognize and identify with the kind of feminist philosophy and the kind of Hegelian philosophy that Hutchings articulates and defends. It should be clear from the outset, however, that Hutchings does not argue that Hegel himself was in any sense a feminist. It is patently obvious from his own remarks on sexual difference that, even in the context of his own time, Hegel's attitude to women was patriarchal and at times misogynist. If Hegel's work is useful to feminist philosophers it is in spit of his own ideological position on the `woman question'.
Hegel famously complained of the inability of Prefaces or Introductions to accomplish the intellectual journey on which a book is designed to take a reader. In line with this complaint, in this review one can only assert the main claims about feminist philosophy and Hegel. The heart of the argument is the claim that Hegel is battling with the same conceptual conundrum that constitute debates in feminist philosophy. Central is the conundrum of how to escape the conceptual binary oppositions (between culture and nature, reason and emotion, autonomy and heteronomy, universal and particular, ideal and real) which have associated women with the denigrated term and prescribed the exclusion of women from the practices of both philosophy and politics. As Hutchings expoundas it, feminist philosophy can be defined as a project to think the world differently, but one which is forever prey to a tendency to lapse back into the terms it is seeking to transcend. This is particularly clear in debates internal to feminist philosophy, in which the difficulty of "thinking differently" becomes apparent in feminist characterizations of opposing positions. Hutchings argues that Hegel prefigures the reductive pattern of internal philosophical debates within feminism in his account of the temptations of modern thought to lapse into onesidedness and exclusivity in his Phenomenology of Spirit and Science of Logic. In addition, Hutchings argues that Hegel provides a resource for resisting the temptations of modernist transcendence, through his insistence on the inseparability of being from truth and his historicization of both being and truth. Having made this argument, Hutchings puts forth an account of its implications for feminist ontology, epistemology and moral and political theory. The later part of the book attempts to show how a Hegelian feminism would respond to contemporary feminist debates about knowledge, morality and politics.