I. The organic logic of sexual difference

In purely logical terms, life for Hegel represents a teleological conception of the syllogistic terms of universality, particularity and singularity. Hegel’s pure logic considers life as a series of logical relations between syllogistic terms, not ‘the life of nature’ as it is ‘exposed to the externality of existence’ and ‘conditioned by inorganic nature’ (SL: 677).Footnote ⁴ Nevertheless, Hegel’s purely logical analysis makes natural and spiritual life intelligible in these syllogistic terms.

After discussing the living individual in the Science of Logic, Hegel turns to the genus process constituted by the reproduction and perishing of generations of living individuals. According to Hegel, the genus is the truth of life as such by implicating all the determinations of the living individual and its life processes, alongside its relations to other living beings of its kind. As such, the genus expresses everything there is to express about the life process of which the individual is a part. Following Hegel’s understanding of universality as a principle of self-identity in otherness, the principle of universality is expressed as the subsistence or self-equality of the genus through many individuals. The principle of particularity is expressed as the instantiations of the genus in many individuals, who are equally singularities as uniting both universality and particularity. The genus, in other words, becomes the object of analysis against which the individual is measured in its inadequacy to the overarching concept of life.

If life is essentially the genus, the singular individual is deficient against the genus process as a mere moment of it. Given this deficiency, Hegel describes the relation between the self-subsistent individual and its genus in terms of a contradiction. On the one hand, the living individual is identical with the genus whose truth it is. The universality or self-equality of the genus inheres in the individual, making the individual what it is as a singular instance of it. On the other hand, the individual is non-identical to the genus as a mere singularity, not the totality of individuals constituting the genus. A contradiction therefore arises in the exemplification of the genus by the individual. Although the genus is the truth of the individual in the sense of encompassing it, the individual does not express this truth adequately on its own.

Hegel claims that the individual consequently has an impulse to sublate its inadequacy to its truth (SL: 687). This impulse is the universality of the genus realizing itself through the sublation of singularities external to one another through their unity and dissolution as individuals. In other words, the truth of the individual is to dissolve or cease to be. Yet, if the individual were to cease to be entirely, so too would the universal inhering in it. As such, purely logically speaking, the dissolution of the individual is simply its dissolution as ‘indifferent, immediate, concrete existence’, with the genus being that into which ‘the isolated singularities of individual life perish’ (SL: 688). As instances of the process of the genus itself, individual living beings relate to each other as that through which the genus works (albeit without implying that the genus has hypostatized being or intentionality of its own), namely through its unity and propagation. The genus ‘is on the one side the generation of singularity just as it is also, on the other side, the sublation of it’, specifically through copulation (SL: 688). The individual unites with others and propagates the living species, which is nothing other than the genus process. So, the genus ‘relates itself to itself as idea, the universal that has universality for its determinateness and existence’ (SL: 688). Following this logic of life, the individual is reducible to this activity of the genus; the individual is nothing other than a passing, dissolving, moment of the genus.

Although Hegel discusses the perishing of living individuals, a logical concept does not die in any literal, organic sense. At most, the perishing of individuals and propagation of the living species might reflect for Hegel a logical negation of a singularity into another without a return back to the negated. Yet, as we turn to concretely existing living beings in nature, in space and time, death becomes literal. In natural terms, Hegel discusses the ‘contradiction’ marking the individual’s inadequacy to the genus, how ‘the universality of the genus, which is the identity of the individuals, is different from the particular individuality of these individuals’ (PN: §368A). The logic of perishing and propagation is exemplified or instantiated instead in the organic death and birth of those individuals. Although worldly being cannot be reduced to logical concepts, they express these concepts and can therefore be described in terms of them. For Hegel, living beings are not purely logical syllogisms but express the syllogistic logic of life.

Hegel describes the organic death of the singulars and the reproduction of singulars who likewise really die in terms of the bad infinite of regress. An infinite regress cannot concretely unify finitude and infinitude, reflecting an endless contradiction on the part of finite beings: ‘This process of propagation issues forth into the progress of the [bad] infinite. The genus preserves itself only through the perishing of the individuals, which fulfill their determination in the process of generation, and in so far as they have no higher determination than this, pass on to death’ (PN: §369). The universality of the genus, dependent on its instantiation in particulars, never escapes the contradiction or inadequacy of its particular members. It cannot achieve concrete existence separated from their inadequacy to its concept. As such, the living individuals resolve this contradiction by generating new living individuals and then dying. The genus can only persist in individuals as their truth, while individuals die for failing to express the truth of the genus adequately. The final purpose of the individual is to generate new life in order to die.

Let us turn more specifically to the role of sexual difference in this bad infinity. Hegel’s logical discussion of copulation reduces the activity to this process, the orientation of individuals toward dissolution. Although not in the Science of Logic, Hegel mentions sexual difference directly in his discussion of life in the Encyclopaedia Logic. As he explains, the genus particularizes itself into sexes relating to each other for its perpetuation, hence as two particulars of the universal (EL: §220).Footnote ⁵ Still, Hegel recognizes that not all life is sexually differentiated.

Hegel’s most extensive discussions of sexual difference occur in his Jena writings on the philosophy of nature from 1805–06, which appear in edited form by Karl Ludwig Michelet as additions to the Philosophy of Nature. Alison Stone notes that, although ‘it might seem that we cannot wisely interpret Hegel’s mature conception of men, women, and their social roles’,

In his Jena account, Hegel characterizes sexual difference in plants as ‘quite partial’ or undeveloped, which clarifies what he takes sexual difference to be (PN: §344A). First, plants lack a sufficiently developed return-to-self whereby living universality penetrates organs; at least some parts of plants exist as individuals of their own, capable of subsistence outside of its relation to the other parts of the plant (PN: §345A). Sexual difference, strictly speaking, exists between ‘two opposed and independent sexes’ in distinct individuals (PN: §342A).Footnote ⁶ Second, the capacity for plants to develop distinct sexual parts from an initially sexless state marks the inessentiality of their sexed parts. In contrast, sexes properly speaking must not be separable from the otherwise indifferent individual but a principle penetrating the entirety of the individual and its ‘disposition’ (PN: §348A). Third, plants do not require sexual copulation for reproduction, with this being ‘a game and a luxury […] not essential to propagation’ as opposed to a fully developed sexual difference marking the negation of sexed individuals (PN: §348A).

Hegel provides a more extended discussion of sexual difference in the context of animality. While some animals can reproduce asexually (PN: §365A),Footnote ⁷ the sex-relationship marks a ‘need’ on the part of sexed individuals to sublate their inadequacy viz-à-viz the genus (PN: §368). The sex-relationship reflects the inadequacy of the individual to the genus that is its substance or truth; the individual living being seeks to sublate this contradiction by bringing the genus into existence in connection with another sex of that genus. The sexual relation is thus reduced to the propagation of the genus, marking the deficiency of an individual against the genus. Although ‘the individual as a singular being is not adequate to the immanent genus’, the sex-relation is ‘the identical self-relation of the genus in a single unity’ (PN: §368). The sex-relation implicates this ‘affirmative positing of the identity of both individuals’ belonging to a common genus by their being ‘mediated by this negation’ of their sexed particularity (PN: §348A).

Presumably, Hegel’s account might encompass certain empirical divergences in nature, for instance, how not all individuals actually reproduce or how the genus might evolve.Footnote ⁸ Yet, Hegel reduces the ontological significance of sexual difference to resolving the contradiction of the individual living being. This move may be charged with the idealist inversion of reality by explaining reality from a concept, declaring a logical contradiction to drive the activity of the real world. Better put, the problem might be that Hegel understands living phenomena following a pure logic of life that can be described otherwise. We will return to this question.

For Hegel, sexual difference is directed to both the propagation of life and the death of the sexed individual.Footnote ⁹ The reproduction of the genus amounts to the negation of the sexed individual into an asexual (geschlechtslos) genus process, hence the ‘disappearance of the sexes’ (PN: §368A). The common, asexual genus ‘permeates both [sexes], and both find themselves within the sphere of this universality’ (PN: §368A). It ‘underlies both male and female genitals’ (PN: §368A). Hegel seems to reason that, because the sexes commonly refer to one genus, the genus must be neither particular sex. As such, the particular sex of each living individual is nothing more than the expression of its inadequacy to this universal genus: ‘The genus is present in the individual as a strain opposed to the inadequacy of its single [sexed] actuality’ (PN: §368). Its union with the sexed other ‘[brings] the genus into existence’ (PN: §368).

We may also understand the asexual genus in terms of the logic of chemism.Footnote ¹⁰ Although sexual difference is a phenomenon of life, and hence cannot be adequately grasped in inorganic terms, Hegel claims that ‘in animate things, the sex relation falls under this schema’ of chemism (SL: 646). In logical terms, chemical objects are opposed to each other as one particular object against another. Any particular object is determined in relation to that opposing particular lying externally to it, thus referring in itself to it. Yet, Hegel claims, this essential reference to totality leads it to ‘[strive] to sublate the immediate determinateness of its existence and to give concrete existence to the objective totality of the concept’ (SL: 646). The striving of the particulars to sublate their one-sidedness is likewise a striving to unite with what they lack against the totality, sublating the one-sidedness of the other extreme in turn. When this unity is realized, the particulars dissolve into the ‘neutrality’ of totality (SL: 647). This neutrality becomes the new middle term or universal between extremes into which they dissolve. However, the neutral product presupposes the process that gives rise to it out of the opposed particulars, implying an essential reference to their subsistence as extremes (SL: 647). The neutral product is itself conceived as an extreme against the extremes, meaning the universal dirempts back into the extremes, just as in the sexual relation. In terms of sexual difference, the asexuality of the genus amounts to a neutralization of the sexual poles that come again to be affirmed.

This chemical logic can reflect the sexual relation assuming there really is a moment of non-sexuate universality in the genus process. Does that moment really exist? Hegel seems to accept that there is a literal moment of asexuality under the presupposition that embryos are hermaphroditic,Footnote ¹¹ or as ‘sexually undifferentiated, as without sexual function or impulse’ (Okazaki Reference Okazaki2022: 206–207). However, there is a breakdown in the logical connection between sexual difference and chemism because no individual, even a sexually undifferentiated one, could be adequate to the universal genus, which inheres in life, not as its own particularity. Moreover, depending on which sex traits we consider like chromosomes, there may be no purely sexless foetal moment for most living beings. Even if we posit this sexless moment considering other sex characteristics, a hermaphroditic organism need not be considered sexless, while a theoretically sexually undifferentiated being of some kind could still be considered sexually differentiated in a sense, namely, in its difference to the sexual difference of its kind. In any case, the concept of a neuter genus does not depend on a really existing neuter moment; it can be understood instead as the universal common to both particular sexes, relating them as members of the same genus. And Hegel nevertheless admits this sexless life is determined to develop back into ‘the same natural individuality, and into a corresponding sexual differentiation and transience’ (PN: §369). Since the genus process operates through sexed individuals, the contradiction of bad infinity persists.Footnote ¹²

II. The hierarchical logic of sexual difference

Hegel’s teleological reduction of sexual difference to copulation and the reproduction of the genus colours his analysis of its content. His analysis of the difference between male and female sexes in animals is presented exclusively in terms of their supposed roles in sexual reproduction. We find no discussion of non-reproductive pleasure in connection to sexuality or any other function of sexuality, for that matter, in his account of nature. Nor do we find an account of the significance of sexual difference beyond its teleological sublation for social reproduction in the transition from family to civil society; the functions of natural reproduction parallel, for Hegel, the social functions of men and women. Hegel’s interpretation of sexual reproduction serves as the mediator between natural and spiritual sublation by associating the male with the principle of activity, sublated in the domain of spirit as social transcendence, and the female with the principle of passivity or undifferentiation. As such, this section considers Hegel’s characterization of male and female sexes in terms of its restriction by this teleological treatment.

In the Jena writings, Hegel ruminates on how the female reproductive system is ‘necessarily the undifferentiated element’ of copulation or exhibits an ‘undeveloped unity’, whereas the male is ‘the sundered element of opposition’ or an ‘active principle’ (PN: §368A). Reminiscent of the Aristotelian conception of copulation,Footnote ¹³ he associates the female with the ‘material element’ of copulation in contrast to the seed expelled by the male representing the principles of activity and ‘subjectivity’ (PN: §368A).Footnote ¹⁴ According to Stone, these characterizations might reflect how the female continuously sustains the foetus, whereas ‘the single emission of semen “represents” the child-to-be as a single individual’ (Stone Reference Stone, Hutchings and Pulkkinen2010: 227). In any case, Hegel considers the correspondence of various sex organs between males and females, supporting this image of male sexuality as active and differentiated versus female sexuality as undeveloped and passive. The medial line of the scrotum is paralleled in the vagina; the lips are conceived as shrunken scrota. The uterus, as the ‘undifferentiated’ site for receiving sperm and growing offspring, is reduced to a matter of indifference for the male in the prostate as a mere gland (PN: §368A). The ovary fails to become, as it does in the testicle, ‘an independent and active cerebrality’ (PN: §368A). And the ‘active sensibility’ of the penis, marked by its ‘effusion of blood’, has its counterpart in the ‘inactive feeling’ of the clitoris and menstruation (PN: §368A).

According to Yuka Okazaki, Hegel’s account diverges in several respects from Galen’s ‘one-sex’ model, as it makes no mention of ‘vital heat’ and does not correspond the same sexed parts (Reference Okazaki2022: 201). The point of others like Tina Chanter (Reference Chanter1995: 84–85) and Laura Werner (Reference Werner, Hutchings and Pulkkinen2010: 206) who invoke the one-sex model is not that there is a technical correspondence to Galen but a general attitude that the female sex is a less developed form of the male sex. In fact, Okazaki also claims that Hegel’s Jena account follows this line. The characterizations of the ‘undeveloped’ and ‘undifferentiated’ female and the references to Jacob Ackermann’s research on hermaphroditism, which Hegel claims makes it ‘quite understandable that one sex should change into the other’ (PN: §368A), supposedly shows that the young Hegel conceives of females as less developed forms of males (Okazaki Reference Okazaki2022: 201f.). In contrast, Okazaki claims, by the time of his lectures on nature, starting with the 1819–20 transcript, Hegel characterizes human beings and other higher animals as primordially hermaphroditic (ursprünglich hermaphroditisch), underscoring the common type underlying them and their formation from the same type, albeit differently (GW: 24/1: 173; GW: 24/2: 1158). Male and female sexes are therefore no longer related as deficient male to fully realized male but in terms of two distinct ways of differentiating from this ‘asexual’ state. Still, there is actually no significant discontinuity in Hegel’s account of sexual difference; his earlier work accepts that the genitals of the sexes correspond to each other precisely because ‘the same type underlies both’ (PN: §368A), without implying the female is an undeveloped male.Footnote ¹⁵ The undeveloped or undifferentiated nature of the female can be read as a comparison between different individuals without implying that females are literally less developed males.

More radically, following Hegel’s logic of sexual difference, females could not be inadequate males. While Werner claims that Hegel ‘constructs sexual and gender difference as a difference within the male’ (Werner Reference Werner, Hutchings and Pulkkinen2010: 204), this would contradict the particularity of the female sex recognized by Hegel. While Stone claims that Hegel considers the female ‘the being-outside-itself of the male […] an inadequate, self-alienated form of the male’, this would ignore how the particularity of the male sex is also inadequate to the asexual genus in Hegel’s account (Stone Reference Stone, Hutchings and Pulkkinen2010: 226).

Nevertheless, Hegel also treats the differences between sexes hierarchically, not between two equal particulars. Although what is undeveloped or undifferentiated might not imply lower or less rational, Hegel’s philosophical project involves tracing the stages of rationality in nature towards more complete adequation. As Stone explains, the association of females with matter and males with subjectivity or concept-permeated individuality, in the context of this project, is not insignificant for a sexual hierarchy (Stone Reference Stone2006: 224–25). The problem of hierarchy becomes explicit in Hegel’s analysis of spirit or the distinctly human realm of existence characterized by its rationality and sociality, with the association of men with universality and women with particularity in a new sense.Footnote ¹⁶ Men realize the rational essence of human spirit in a way generally foreclosed to women. They remain particulars in the genus process, unable to realize its universality, but as this particular sex attain a rational universality that is the truth or end of human spirit as such.

Considering how spirit sublates nature, it would be surprising for Hegel to make biologically deterministic claims about sex differences in human beings. We as spirit can make tools of our bodies, oppose our ego to the body, and imbue the body with social meaning. As Stone explains, the realm of human spirit imparts new meaning on our natural determinations, enfolding them within its structures, ‘[rendering] this material functional for its own ends, thereby imparting to this material an enhanced level of rationality’ (Stone Reference Stone2006: 222). The natural determinations of sexual difference come to be spiritually elevated and expressed in new ethical and intellectual significance by human beings, most importantly in its transformation into a properly ethical relation in non-capricious familial love (PM: §397, 518; PhG: §459; LNR: §§76–77; PR: §165).Footnote ¹⁷ In this sense, as he claims in the Philosophy of Mind, ‘the difference of the natural sexes also appears at the same time as a difference of intellectual and ethical determination’ (PM: §519).

Surprisingly, then, Hegel also claims that the natural difference between sexes, marked by differences of passivity and activity, extends into the realm of spirit (PN: §355A; LNR: §77). Stone denies that, for Hegel, biology ‘predisposes [men and women] toward certain kinds of activities and away from others’, although ‘men’s and women’s different biological traits reflect and realize a difference in reproductive roles that is required by the metaphysical character of reproduction’ (Stone Reference Stone, Hutchings and Pulkkinen2010: 221). Likewise, Werner claims that the difference between sexes has a conceptual, rather than biological, basis, with neither material bodies or social and political life determining each other; they rather ‘both result from the spirito-conceptual actual difference he perceives’ between male and female sexes (Werner Reference Werner, Hutchings and Pulkkinen2010: 197). However, although these interpretations rightly challenge simplistically deterministic views of the relation between nature and spirit, there is no clear distinction between the metaphysical and the biological in this case. Hegel does not derive the roles of male and female sexes logically but bases them on a perception of their anatomy. Hegel clearly argues that natural determinations provide a ground for distinct forms of subjectivity. The natural determinations of sex call for institutions capable of sublating them in the first place, responsive to the ground that these determinations provide for human sociality.

Hegel might be basing his remarks on men and women, to some extent, on empirical observation of his day. Yet, he presents this gendered division as a necessity or inevitability, marking a metaphysical closure for women,Footnote ¹⁸ when his dialectical method could be used to challenge why nature could not be more completely sublated by spirit, never mind the spurious characterizations of these natural determinations. We will return to this critique.

Hegel repeatedly connects women’s difficulty differentiating from their sexual determination toward rational universality to their natural sexed determinations. The sex-relationship is akin to a relation between ‘a subjectivity remaining in immediate unity with its substance’ (woman) ‘and a subjectivity entering into opposition to this substance’ (man), associated with the ‘sleeping soul’ and the ‘waking soul’ of an individual, respectively (PM: §398A). Men, unlike women, better assert their subjectivity in opposition to worldly being. Given the predominance of their less differentiated feeling, women, like animals, are more susceptible than men to certain natural influences like magnetism (PM: §406A). Alternatively, if men are closer to animals in their activity, their ability to act in the world as individuals, women are more akin to plants that lack fully realized individuality, ‘for the [plant] is a more peaceful unfolding whose principle is the more indeterminate unity of feeling’ (PM: §406A).Footnote ¹⁹

It seems to me ungenerous to interpret these already egregious pronouncements about women too literally. It is not as if, for Hegel, women literally lack all capacity for understanding or reason, as if they were literally incapable of articulate speech like plants or animals. However, the accomplishments of women are always qualified. In the Philosophy of Right, Hegel accepts that women can be educated, although ‘imperceptibly […] more through living than through the acquisition of knowledge’ (PR: §166A). He even grants that, upon the completion of education, both sons and daughters become recognized as persons under the law, hold free property of their own, and found their own families, albeit with men as heads and women as wives (PR: §177). He also recognizes that some women have deviated from ‘the essential vocation’ of the sexes, albeit with further qualifications, for instance how the state is threatened when women come to power ‘for their actions are based not on the demands of universality but on contingent inclination and opinion’ (PR: §166A). Hegel even allows that women occasionally enter into the domains of art or science, although he denies the significance of their accomplishments and claims that they are not ‘made for’ these domains and the rationality they demand (PM: §406A).Footnote ²⁰

Those who would charge Hegel with contradicting his commitments to the freedom of spirit by denying half of spirit access to freedom must contend with these complications. It is not the case, as Allen Wood claims, that Hegel contradicts himself by seeing women as humans, hence subjects, but denying them subjectivity by denying them a particular social or political standing (Wood Reference Wood1990: 245). Women are indeed free and self-conscious subjects in Hegel’s account, only they fail to attain the more concrete or realized expressions of freedom in objective and absolute spirit for themselves (or, almost always, exist in these structures as passive imbibers of male accomplishments).Footnote ²¹

Even with occasional deviations from their ‘essential vocation’, however, women generally fail to differentiate from the ‘instinctive and emotional harmony’ of the sexual relation, Hegel says. The social distinction between sexes has its origin in their ‘physical basis’:

For Hegel, the concrete universal of free rationality can be achieved only through the arduous labour of uniting with difference, of identifying with oneself in otherness, thus in recognizing the world as one’s own on which to labour with other free agents in such domains as the state, science and art. As the domain of historical development, freedom becomes more concrete or complete with the increasingly self-conscious recognition of one’s freedom as a process of appropriating otherness and reflecting oneself in it, sustained by social and political infrastructures established toward this end. The universal at stake is thus one in which spirit reunites with itself and comes to know itself in otherness as the result of its self-sundering. It is a development toward the rational communities in which spirit can thus freely act on the world and transform it and the intellectual pursuits whereby spirit can know itself and its free essence.Footnote ²²

This concrete universality is realized only by men, not women.Footnote ²³ As Werner claims, men work on the world and realize themselves in it, attaining an identity that does not ‘[close] out difference but [is] necessarily connected to it’ (Werner Reference Werner, Hutchings and Pulkkinen2010: 200). The ‘free universality’ or ‘powerful and active’ nature of men leads them to have their ‘actual substantial life in the state, in learning, etc., and otherwise in work and struggle with the external world and with himself’, in contrast to the passivity and subjectivity of women (PR: §166). Women attain only ‘formal, abstract identity and unity without the reflexive process of self-differentiation’, lacking ‘inner complexity that results from the labor of first dividing and opposing themselves and only after that finding themselves again’ (Werner Reference Werner, Hutchings and Pulkkinen2010: 200). They lack the capacity to labour on the world and realize universally accessible achievements, or to be part of those achievements, as part of a rational community. They fail to put aside familial interests to work in civil institutions or produce universal, scientific truths. Hence, women fail to realize themselves fully as socially active, free, and rational agents, and women’s individuality is not reconciled with rational university (LNR: §77; PR: §166).

Hegel further connects the ‘activity’ of men and the ‘passivity’ of women to their respective social roles in the family and civil society. As Stone notes, for Hegel, the family is an ethical community ‘whose members share a sense of their common good and lack any sense of purely individual interests’, although it also meets the desires of ‘physical, corporeal, individuals’ (Stone Reference Stone2006: 167–68). In cases of moral love, both sexes feel the drive to renounce their independence in establishing a family (PR: §161). As such, men also belong to families and experience dependence in them. Nevertheless, Hegel claims that men should partake in the family as its head, controlling its resources (PR: §171),Footnote ²⁴ and also ‘[have] another field of ethical activity apart from the family’ (PR: §164A). In contrast, the vocation of women ‘consists essentially only in the marital relationship’ (PR: §164A). They meet the sensuous needs of their husbands ‘so that, reinvigorated, he may rejoin the quest to further the universal’ (LNR: §77). As Mary C. Rawlinson explains, for Hegel, ‘the purpose and result of [women’s] labor is to free man from the body and its needs, so that he may be free for the theoretical pursuits of politics and science’ (Rawlinson Reference Rawlinson2016: 86).Footnote ²⁵ Women, Rawlinson continues, ‘having no access to these domains, remain tied to particularity and to the repetitive, rather than “formative”, labor of caring for the body’ (Reference Rawlinson2021: 125). For Hegel, women are not only inadequate in science, politics, and philosophy; their participation ‘jeopardizes the entire human enterprise by leaving the body untended’ (Rawlinson Reference Rawlinson2016: 90). In this narrative, women thus serve, in their familial role, as the ground for the reproduction of male sociality.Footnote ²⁶

The genus process is sublated in the moral love of the family and its now social reproduction, although the natural inevitability of death becomes a problem for the renewal of society. Much of Hegel’s discussion of the family concerns the status of the child.Footnote ²⁷ While the ‘natural dissolution’ of the family occurs with the death of its members, the ethical dissolution of the family, or the transition to a higher sphere of ethical existence, ‘consists in the fact that the children are brought up to become free personalities’ in the state and civil society (PR: §177; see also PM: §§521–22). The truth of the family, its telos, is its sublation by civil institutions establishing the rational, self-realizing personhood of its members (PR: §159). Yet, this ethical dissolution is sexually differentiated. While both men and women go on to establish families of their own, only men realize the rational universal to which the family is directed. The boy will have access to civil society in a way generally foreclosed to the girl. The sister will be unable to see herself in the universal accomplishments of her brother and return his rational gaze.Footnote ²⁸

The sexual indifferentiation of the rational universal thus has two aspects: first, it is an activity of only one sex; and second, it realizes the truth of spirit as such, the most realized expression of its freedom, where women fail to attain their own truth. In the realm of spirit, the sexual difference of the family is directed toward the sexually undifferentiated universal.

Yet, the rational universal relies on sexual difference as its sublated ground. For Hegel, one sex attains the universal where the other fails because the other fails. The labour of the universal thus continues to rely on sexual difference, on the ethical substance of the family and women’s labour.Footnote ²⁹ Even if the truth of the family is its ethical dissolution, the subordination of the family to the public structures of ethical life, meaning it ought not hold absolute authority over its members in opposition to the civil community, this community relies on the family. The difference between Hegel’s account of the Ancient Greek form of the family in the Phenomenology of Spirit and the modern family in the Philosophy of Right hinges on the recognition of this dependence. As Stone explains, rather than ‘signal the dissolution of political community’, the modern state ‘legally protects, supports, and regulates the family and civil society’ so that individuals ‘can, reciprocally, recognise the validity of pursuing private interests’, since ‘people’s pursuit of their separate interests now typically elevates them to adhere to the common good’ (Stone Reference Stone2006: 177; see also PR: §260). Hegel’s account of women as the ‘eternal irony’ of the community (PhG: 460) in the dialectic between family and civil society thus falls away in modern sociality, at least superficially. But it falls away not because women are any more inclined toward the rational universal. Rather, this achievement belongs to the civil institutions of men, capable of organizing society to sublate the family to the rational universal more adequately.

III. Beyond the end of sexual difference

It would be a mistake to conflate the systematic importance of sexual difference for Hegel’s account of nature and spirit with the impossibility of interpreting Hegel otherwise. We may recognize, on the one hand, that Hegel’s account of spirit relies on a limited and limiting understanding of the natural significance of sexual difference. If we erase Hegel’s comments on sexual difference as obviously outdated or naïve, we remove an essential component of his account of nature and spirit. Given the systematic importance of Hegel’s comments on sexual difference for universality, neutering nature and spirit amounts not to preserving the rest of his system against a momentary bias to be excised but the entire reimagining of these domains. The problem of sexual difference must be tarried with, I argue, to grasp the Hegelian system as Hegel presents it. Yet, on the other hand, once we recognize this systematic importance, challenging Hegel’s account of sexual difference reveals the exercise for what it is: a reimagining of the universal. It may well be a question how far this reimagining can go while remaining Hegelian. Yet, that question would arise for anyone who rejects Hegel’s account of universality viz-à-viz sexual difference in order to excise the arguably uncritical elements from his system.

In this section, I critique Hegel’s teleological reduction of sexual difference to the sexually undifferentiated universality of the natural genus and rational spirit. In conversation with his feminist critics, I consider how Hegel’s account of sexual difference is marked by a certain closure of its significance to its own end. The critique is motivated by two ideas.

First, despite its limits, Hegel’s account of sexual difference reveals an essential relatedness between sexes significant to the conception of most life, including human life and sociality. Hegel’s most important lesson may be that no one sex can be all that a genus can be, hence that we cannot reduce the sexed other without contradicting one’s own determination as sexed. Indeed, his account of the genus process and the tides of generations reminds us of the essential relationality and dependence of the (sexed) living individual, including the human being, on the difference of sexes. For such beings, this dependence is ontological in that the individual cannot exist without belonging to some sex or relating otherwise to sexual difference as its genetic condition of possibility.Footnote ³⁰ The ontological is meant broadly in the sense of pertaining to the very being of some being. From the Hegelian perspective, an account of the being of sexed beings must include reference to sexual difference, hence a negative relation to sexual others. Despite his hierarchal view of the sexes, Hegel also considers the role of sexual difference in the constitution of distinct masculine and feminine subjectivities. The feminine subject remains a real other to man, opening a gendered division of labour in and between family and civil society. As such, Hegel’s account stands opposed to a philosophical tradition that has thought the subject as neuter or modelled as only one. Although we may be more sceptical of how Hegel ontologizes gender roles, he gestures to the irreducibility of the one sexed subject to the other.Footnote ³¹ In these respects, he anticipates feminists like Luce Irigaray and Elizabeth Grosz who consider the irreducibility of sexual difference for conceiving both nature and human sociality.Footnote ³²

Second, the critique of Hegel reveals alternative possibilities for conceiving the natural and spiritual universal for a non-hierarchal account of sexual ontology. By demonstrating how Hegel’s account of sexual difference is uncritically restricted by a teleological reduction of its significance, we justify this critical exercise as a challenge to the supposed inevitability of describing sexual difference in Hegel’s terms. It reveals a certain unquestioned but not inevitable interpretation undergirding the Hegelian account. We may uptake the Hegelian lesson to think essential relationality of the sexes to think its significance differently than does Hegel, which may allow us to reimagine or reopen a Hegelian philosophy of nature and spirit for today. I cannot exhaust that task in this short article. However, I offer two criticisms of the teleological analysis that ends sexual difference for Hegel. The first, concerning the natural genus, offers a way of conceiving sexual difference without resorting to death. The second, concerning sexual hierarchy, offers a way of conceiving the universality of human sociality as sexually differentiated, with women having access to the rational accomplishments of civil society.

As it concerns the natural genus, the directedness of sexual difference to death fails to engage its significance as a living and lived limit for the sexed individual adequately. Just as Hegel provides us the ground for thinking this relationality at the heart of sexed existence, he reduces the truth of the living individual to its own death in the neuter genus. Hegel justifies this reduction by modelling his analysis of natural life off of the logical concept of life. Yet, as a logical concept, the genus is not threatened with death like it is in its natural significance. Although Hegel recognizes the dependence of the universal on the tides of individuals both logically and naturally, he does not consider the fragility of the universal in view of the fragility of its instantiations in individuals in the natural world. The reductive orientation of life toward death for the sake of perpetuating life may thus be challenged as a logical imposition onto nature. The purpose of the living individual may well be not to die for the genus, asserting its individuality to other ends, thus challenging the priority of the neuter universal to its sexed individuality in some respect. Moreover, recognizing the dependence of the genus on living individuals contains the seed of a dialectical reversal for conceiving both the logic and natural expression of life. If the genus depends on living individuals, the purpose of the genus might instead be grasped as the cultivation and flourishing of individuals in their many instantiations of this universality or common belonging. The failure of the individual to exhaust this universal might be understood as a creative divergence rather than a simple demand for death, even if death proves inevitable for it. The individual may be negated but not for the neuter genus.

This critique does not imply that Hegel is mistaken in claiming that the individual is inadequate to the universal genus, which in both pure logic and the philosophy of nature marks the conceptual limit of life and its transition to spirit. Yet, even if we preserved the deficiency of the individual, we need not reduce the individual to its negation or dissolution into the genus.

While Hegel considers sexual difference as if it were a tool for perpetuating the genus, the logical and natural significance of sex may be expanded to include the cultivation of a sexed being’s living singularity. When we conceive death as the fundamental limit of life, we fail to consider sex as a living limit through which we can reconfigure ourselves and our relations to the (sexed) other and to our environments. According to Irigaray, whose critique of Heidegger on death is apropos of Hegel’s analysis of life, the relational structure of sexual difference ‘solves the question of […] finiteness without necessarily having to resort to death’ (Irigaray Reference Irigaray2017: 3). The sex of the living individual is a mark—at least one of the marks—of its being the not-all of the genus. For the human being, who may take up this sexed finiteness in its free projects, sexual difference might thus mark the return to self in the recognition of our limit and the cultivation of a relation to another subject through that limit, which Irigaray labels ‘self-affection’ and ‘hetero-affection’ respectively.Footnote ³³ For Irigaray, attentiveness to our own sexed finitude or not-all of the genus might prepare us to relate to sexed others in their sensuous presence, beyond any external purposiveness or drive for domination, as irreducible and inexhaustible partners of desire. In contrast, despite discussing ethical love and a gendered division of social labour, Hegel does not detail how one might form relations with oneself and others considering the sexed potentialities of the body. In other words, what is apparently missing in Hegel’s analysis is how sexual difference might be cultivated or experienced beyond natural or social reproduction. The sense of sex for Hegel remains tied to the transcending of sexual difference rather than a directedness of the individual toward its own sex or the sex of the other beyond a reproductive logic.

The restrictive focus on reproduction also grounds the metaphysical closure of the rational universal to women (Brauer Reference Brauer2007: 129). As Simone de Beauvoir claims, Hegel’s mistake is ‘to argue from significance to necessity […] Man gives significance to the sexes and their relations through sexual activity, just as he gives sense and value to all the functions that he exercises; but sexual activity is not necessarily implied in the nature of the human being’ (de Beauvoir Reference de Beauvoir and Parshley1989: 7).Footnote ³⁴ Hegel’s discussion of male and female sexes not only reduces them to their roles in reproduction but also interprets these roles spuriously. Is it surprising that Hegel does not notice the excitation of the clitoris when he thinks of copulation not in terms of pleasure but in terms of reproductive function? Do we not also see the potential for this excitation, for this activity and effusion of blood, in that sexual act? Is it surprising that Hegel thinks the male sex to be differentiated and oppositional thanks to the visibility of the penis from flaccid to erect? Yet, what justifies characterizing male sexuality as active with this shift in excitation? Might we not instead conceive the copulative act in terms of the engulfing of the penis by the vagina? Why would the erect penis justify the oppositional characterization of male activity and female passivity? Does he think the uterus as the undifferentiated site for reproduction, as a receptacle for male activity, because he imagines it as empty, as a lack? Does he not see how the uterus can become a differentiated interval for nourishing life? Is the problem a matter of visibility—what is visible, that is, to him?Footnote ³⁵

These questions challenge the passivity-activity binary Hegel overlays on the male-female binary. The deconstruction of this binary has already been enacted in some contemporary feminist philosophy, with both masculine and feminine sexuality being recognized as multiple and dynamic, with different sites of the body having active and passive functions, including beyond its restrictively copulative functions.Footnote ³⁶ As feminist cultural critics have long recognized, the classical narrative of the copulative process as one of male activity and female passivity mirrors entrenched gender stereotypes. The active role of the egg in fertilization is easily erased when historically entrenched social roles between the sexes are projected onto the process (Martin Reference Martin1991). We may also consider how certain expressions of sex and sexuality, both human and non-human, do not conform to Hegel’s binary characterizations of male and female, to which Hegel gives only rudimentary voice in his discussions of Ackermann and the ‘transitional sex’ (Uebergangsgeschlecht).Footnote ³⁷ Indeed, part of the problem of Hegel’s otherwise generally binary account of sex is whether the wide diversity of sexual expressions across life fit into it and how we might recategorize sexes considering our ethical, political, and scientific investments.Footnote ³⁸

What might be most jarring about Hegel’s account of sexual difference as a hierarchal difference might be, however, the metaphysical closure of the rational universal to women as such. The conflation of significance with necessity requires not only the erasure of the historical accomplishments of women but the denial of future possibilities for gender roles. On this question, with Hegel’s univocity on the inaccessibility of the rational universal to women, there seems to be no waiting for Minerva’s owl to fly. Instead, understanding gender both in terms of individual identity and social recognition, we may recognize the sexed facticity of the body as sublated in our spiritual projects, infused with meaning, and itself open to transformation. This is not to say that corporeity has no role in structuring subjectivity, at least possibly so, but simply that what it means to live with our sex cannot be determined prior to our experience of it.

Despite this metaphysical closure, Rawlinson notes that, in recognizing the unique contributions of women to human sociality, Hegel opens us to considering the essential role of women’s labour in it (Rawlinson Reference Rawlinson2021: 127–29). As she writes, ‘neither women’s labor, nor maternal thinking, nor the complex dramas of family life are afforded any serious phenomenological analysis’ by Hegel (Rawlinson Reference Rawlinson2021: 127). Yet, Hegel points to the necessity of these aspects of human sociality, historically coded feminine, as they undergird civil society. When we de-ontologize the hierarchal aspects in Hegel’s analysis of sexual difference, recognizing them instead as contingent configurations, we may better reckon with the rational justifications undergirding this gendered division of labour between family and civil society, particularly the need to care for the body and sensuous individuality against our reduction to abstract citizens or ‘someones’. The historical inheritance of this division of labour and its subsequent weakening may inform our understanding of contemporary forms of human sociality and their dialectics. Indeed, considering this historical inheritance, we might better understand continued disparities between sexes and the continued influence of gender roles in structuring the relations of private and public. As the division falls away without adequate replacement by new social forms capable of addressing care of the body and family, we might also inform our understanding of contemporary problems concerning social alienation or disintegration. We might also ask how best to think a sexually differentiated civil society, namely, whether the difference between sexes is entirely indifferent to the work of the rational universal or whether difference should be recognized in policies like sexed rights. In other words, the question today is whether the rational universal, as the work of different sexes, hence sexually differentiated in that regard, might itself be indifferent to sexual difference.

Before critically reappropriating Hegel to conceive a rational universal no longer built on a sexual hierarchy, the natural and rational universal must be critiqued. In this article, I have sought only to open space for this critique against the teleological reductionism in Hegel’s account of sexual difference. Still more is to be done to think through the rational universal beyond this reductionism. It might be easy enough for feminist thinkers to forego the critique and offer an account of nature and spirit without reference to Hegel. Yet, Hegel might still provide resources for thinking through the ontological nature of sexual difference. And these paths must be thought for those of us still invested in Hegelian philosophy and its promise of the universal.