The Feminist Challenge: The Gender of Reason
This text is a preview of History of the Reception of Hegel, volume II, to be published in 2026 by Reflexivity Press.
Hegel’s Position: The Performative Contradiction
In his Philosophy of Right, Hegel develops a theory of the family that systematically treats the relation between the sexes. For him, the family is “ethical life in its natural form” — the first stage at which the individual moves beyond mere egoism and is absorbed into a community. So far this is unproblematic.
But then comes the assignment: the man belongs to the public sphere — state, science, economy. The woman belongs to the private sphere — family, household, child-rearing. In the notorious addition to § 166, it says: “Women may indeed be educated, but they are not made for the higher sciences, for philosophy, and for certain productions of art which require a universal element.”
This position contradicts Hegel’s own method in a fundamental way. His Phenomenology of Spirit develops the master-servant dialectic as the basic structure of self-consciousness: I can know myself as a self only if I am recognized by another self. Recognition is not optional but constitutive of self-consciousness. Every self-consciousness needs recognition by another self-consciousness.
If that is so, then recognition cannot be restricted to part of humanity. Whoever denies women the capacity for “higher science” withholds from them a portion of the recognition due to every self-consciousness. This is performatively inconsistent: Hegel demands recognition as a universal principle (in his method) but denies it to women (in his content).
Hegel’s “justification” for the subordination of women appeals to nature: women are “by nature” destined for domestic life, men for public life. But his own logic shows that such naturalizations are suspect. What appears as “nature” is often “second nature” — socially produced, then forgotten. Hegel sees this clearly with other phenomena: slavery was regarded as “natural” for centuries, but was in truth historically produced and eventually overcome. On the relation between the sexes, however, he remains blind to this insight.
The diagnosis is clear: Hegel confuses the particular (his contemporary bourgeois gender order) with the universal (reason as such). He projects historically particular relations onto “nature” or “logic.” His theory of gender cannot be derived from his method — it contradicts it. It is time-bound ideology, not systematic necessity.
Simone de Beauvoir: The Second Sex
Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex (1949) is one of the most influential philosophical books of the twentieth century. Its central thesis has become famous: “One is not born, but rather becomes, a woman.”
Beauvoir explicitly employs Hegel’s master-servant dialectic to analyze the relation between the sexes. Woman appears in history as “the Other” — not as a subject who determines herself, but as an object defined by man. Man posits himself as “the self,” as the universal human subject. Woman is defined as “not-man,” as a deviation from the norm, as the Other of the self.
This structure is analogous to the master-servant dialectic: the master defines himself as the essential, the servant as the inessential. The master is subject, the servant object. But in Hegel there is a dialectical reversal: the servant, who works and shapes the world, develops independence through his labor. The master, who only enjoys, becomes dependent on the servant. Domination sublates itself.
Beauvoir’s central insight is that this reversal fails to occur in the relation between the sexes. Woman remains trapped in the position of “the Other.” She does not develop independence through her labor — because her labor (housework, child-rearing) is not recognized as “real” work. It does not become public, visible, remunerated. Woman works, but her labor disappears.
Beauvoir analyzes three factors that explain this fixation. First, there is a biological asymmetry: pregnancy, childbirth, and nursing historically make women dependent during certain phases. This is not a determination of essence, but a historical condition that shaped the division of labor in premodern societies. Second, there is economic dependence: for centuries women were dependent on male income, had no property of their own, and were excluded from education and professions. The economic basis for independence was lacking. Third, there is ideological naturalization: historical-social dependence was presented as “natural.” What had been made appeared as given. Woman “is” this way, not because she was made this way.
Beauvoir’s solution is existentialist: women must project themselves as free subjects. They must choose “transcendence” — project, self-determination, going beyond what is given. Not “immanence” — remaining in the given role, accepting what has been assigned.
The limit of this solution, however, becomes clearly apparent. It remains too abstract, too individualistic. Beauvoir overlooks that freedom itself is socially constituted. One cannot simply “project oneself” against massive structural constraints. This is not Hegel’s concept of freedom — which sees freedom realized in institutions — but Sartre’s, which grasps freedom as an individual act. If a woman lives in a society that systematically denies her education, employment, and economic independence, she cannot “liberate” herself by mere resolve of will.
Beauvoir’s achievement is ideology critique: she shows how “the feminine” was constructed as a projection, how a particular (the bourgeois gender order) passed itself off as a universal (“woman”). Her limitation is the lack of institutional mediation. Freedom requires legal equality, economic independence, cultural transformation. The existentialist concept of freedom can negate, but it cannot construct.
Luce Irigaray: The Biologistic Wrong Turn
Luce Irigaray, the Belgian-French philosopher and psychoanalyst, radicalizes feminist critique in a problematic direction. In Speculum of the Other Woman (1974), she argues that the whole of Western philosophy is “phallogocentrism” — a logic shaped by masculinity.
Her thesis: Hegel’s dialectic itself is masculine logic. The movement from thesis and antithesis to synthesis, the overcoming, the sublating — all of this, she claims, are masculine figures of thought, mirroring “penetration” and “dominance.” The alternative would be “feminine thinking”: plurality instead of unity, non-identity instead of identity, touch instead of overcoming.
This is a fundamental category error. Irigaray makes the same mistake as racism — only with the sign reversed. Racism derives mental properties from biological features (skin color): “Black people cannot…” Irigaray derives structures of thought from biological features (sex): “Men think this way, women that way.” Both project biological categories onto mental structures. This is biologism, regardless of whether it comes “from above” (men rational, women emotional) or “from below” (feminine logic as an alternative to masculine logic).
The performative contradiction is obvious: Irigaray criticizes “masculine logic” using logic. She argues that argumentation is patriarchal — through argumentation. She wants to establish “feminine thinking” — yet in doing so, she thinks. This is performatively inconsistent.
The essentialism is equally problematic: Irigaray writes as though “the feminine” and “the masculine” were fixed determinations of essence. But her own existence refutes this: as a woman, she thinks, argues, uses logic. So thinking is not “masculine.” It is human — it is realized in human beings of every sex.
Irigaray’s position is not merely wrong, it is dangerous. It reproduces gender stereotypes with the sign reversed. If women “think differently,” why should they then have access to science and politics, which after all require “masculine thinking”? Biologism undermines feminist emancipation.
The correct conclusion is a different one: we must criticize historical-cultural distortions without abandoning logical structures. That Hegel sometimes uses masculine-coded metaphors does not mean that dialectic is “masculine.” Logic, dialectic, reason are gender-neutral — they can be practiced by any human being.
Judith Butler: Performativity as an Alternative
Judith Butler, who began in the 1980s with her dissertation on Hegel, points to a third way. In Gender Trouble (1990), she argues that gender is not biologically given but performatively constructed. There is no “essence” of femininity or masculinity that precedes social construction. Gender is produced through repeated acts, gestures, stagings.
This is thought in Hegelian terms — mediated through Kojève. Subjectivity arises through recognition, not before it. The self is not a fixed core that is then recognized, but arises only in the process of recognition. Butler radicalizes this: the gendered self, too, arises only through performative acts that constitute it as “masculine” or “feminine.”
In this way she avoids Irigaray’s biologism: there is no “feminine nature” corresponding to a particular kind of thinking. And she overcomes Beauvoir’s existentialism: freedom is not mere resolve of will against structures, but arises through displacement, subversion, a different repetition of the performative acts.
Butler also shows the dark side: recognition can fail, become distorted, become oppressive. Not every recognition is liberating. Recognition as a “woman” in a patriarchal society is at the same time the assignment of a subordinate position. Liberation requires not simply more recognition, but the transformation of the structures of recognition themselves.
The full unfolding of Butler’s position belongs in Volume III. Here it suffices to note: feminist critique does not necessarily lead to biologism or existentialism. It can be reformulated in Hegelian terms as a critique of distorted recognition and as a program for its institutional transformation.