Beyond Tragedy: Tracing the Aristophanian Subtext of Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit

Abstract

Hegel’s account of the Greek ethical world in the Phenomenology of Spirit seems to have inspired more feminist philosophers than any other classical text. This is hardly surprising, given Hegel’s explicit reflection on the issue of gender in the sections devoted to the ethical world. Since he seems to maintain, moreover, that men and women should comply with the roles assigned to them by nature, it is no more surprising that feminist readings of this text have generally assumed the form of criticism. There is no doubt that these criticisms have played an important part in the development of feminist philosophy. It seems to me, however, that the time has come to assess critically these criticisms of Hegel themselves. In order to contribute to such a critical assessment I will, in this chapter, try to extricate Hegel’s text from some of the preconceptions that have guided feminist readings of Hegel. As I see it, these readings generally presuppose, first, that the sections of the Phenomenology devoted to Greek ethical life purport to offer an interpretation of Sophocles’ Antigone and, second, that Hegel uses the Antigone to express his own view on the issue of gender.² In order to challenge these claims I will reconsider the texts at stake in light of the peculiar method that Hegel deploys throughout the Phenomenology. In doing so, I will largely focus on the section entitled Ethical Action and dwell in particular on its final pages. I thus hope to reconstruct the hidden subtext of these pages and, hence, to illuminate some of its most abstruse sections.

A different version of the article was published under the title “The Eternal Irony of the Community,” Inquiry Vol. 52 No. 4 (2009): 311–334.