Andreja Novakovic

This chapter charts the critical reception of Hegel's social and political philosophy in the hands of Susan Blow, Anna Brackett, and Marietta Kies, members of a group known as the St. Louis Hegelians. I situate them in the philosophical movement of American idealism and argue that there is a common thread permeating their disagreements with Hegel, for each raises an implicit objection to Hegel's delineation of a rational social order. Susan Blow challenges Hegel's views on the institutional context of early childhood education, Anna Brackett Hegel's gendered division of labor, and Marietta Kies Hegel's differentiation of the motives in civil society and in the state. What their writings show is that Hegel's concrete description of ethical life, specifically of the boundaries between its social spheres, needs to be amended in order to make it relevant to an American context in the second half of the 19th century.

In his Philosophy of Right, Hegel describes a set of practices, according to which women fulfill their "vocation" by working to sustain their family, whereas men work in civil society and the state. This paper examines how Hegel attempts to justify this gendered division of labor. In particular, I argue that Hegel takes the gendered division of labor to be a species of a division of mediating labor, according to which it is part of some people's job to represent one sphere in another. This, however, does not show that a gendered division of labor is either necessary or optimal in a rational social order. My paper concludes by asking what Hegel’s justification of the gendered division of labor tells us about his overall methodology.

Transformative experiences are widely discussed today because they seem to pose a special problem for decision making. In my paper, I focus on a species of transformative experiences – conversion experiences – that are not preceded by a decision to become transformed. If we take aesthetic and religious conversions as examples, we see that conversions look like absurd occurrences not only in the moment, but also in hindsight. This is a challenge for the transformative experiences at issue in Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit. According to my proposal, Hegel thinks of these experiences as conversion-like in some respects, but he also holds that they can be reconstructed in the form of an argument. It is just that this argument is always going to trail in the wake of whatever transformative experiences themselves first disclose.

Hegel famously argues that the patriarchal, bourgeois nuclear family is a rational institution worth defending. Scholars have asked what exactly to do with this seemingly outdated part of his social and political philosophy. In particular, they have wondered whether Hegel's concept of the family can accommodate changes to our understanding of what counts as a family and what constitutes family relations. In this Element, I ask whether Hegel's defense of the family can be reconciled with family abolition, the project not of reforming the family as an institution, but of radically transforming it beyond recognition. By examining the three relationships that Hegel associates with the family – brothers and sisters, husbands and wives, and parents and children – I argue that Hegel's concept of the family can be reconciled with family abolition so described. What Hegel provides is an account of the family as a site at which important goods have been discovered and eveloped, without claiming that the family as an institution is necessary for, or even ideally suited to, their continued realization. These goods are singular individuality, ethical love, and material resources.

Through her wide ranging films, Akerman addresses subjects such as home and homelessness, work and social reproduction, self and identity, and desire in its many forms. This book is the first philosophical study of Akerman's oeuvre. Andreja Novakovic looks at patterns of staying put and moving on in the Belgian auteur's deeply personal body of work, drawing on writers from Cavell to Beauvoir, and Federici. It is an absorbing reinterpretation of one of the most important directors of European cinema, whose Jeanne Dielman was recently selected as Sight and Sound's Greatest Film of All Time.

What does it take to be subjectively free in an objectively rational social order? In this book Andreja Novakovic offers a fresh interpretation of Hegel's account of ethical life by focusing on his concept of habit or 'second nature'. Novakovic addresses two central and difficult issues facing any interpretation of his Philosophy of Right: why Hegel thinks that it is is better to relate unreflectively to the laws of ethical life, and which forms of reflection, especially critical reflection, remain available within ethical life. Her interpretation draws on numerous parts of Hegel's system, particularly on his 'Anthropology' and his Phenomenology of Spirit, and also explores connections between his account and those of other philosophers. Her aim is to argue that Hegel has a compelling conception of the ordinary ethical standpoint which takes seriously both the virtues and the perils of reflection.

In this paper, I examine the relationship between melodrama and social criticism in Douglas Sirk’s All that Heaven Allows (1955) and Imitation of Life (1959). Robert Pippin has emphasized Sirk’s use of undercut endings to provoke second thoughts by allowing the audience to perceive something to which the characters on screen are willfully blind. Taking Pippin’s account of such “second-thought melodramas” as my starting point, I ask to what exactly these undercut endings draw our attention. Sirk himself suggested that his Hollywood melodramas are socially critical because they aspire to produce a consciousness of conditions, especially of the social conditioning on love. I argue that the conditions Sirk is referring to is social reality itself, especially the reality of gender and race, which shapes seemingly authentic desires and regularly frustrates attempts at connection, even when the characters get their ostensibly happy endings.

Hegel claims that nothing truly great has ever been accomplished in history without passion. In this paper I aim to explain what he means by passion and why he holds it in such high esteem, even though he thinks that its great contribution is limited to historical contexts. I consider the role of passion in the cunning of reason, proposing that passion be understood as a concrete expression of reason. I also argue that passion illuminates the structure of motivation in general, specifically the relationship between “universality” and “particularity” embodied in what Hegel refers to as the matter-at-hand. Finally, I turn to the peculiarity of passion, showing that passion in the historically relevant sense differs from other motives because it is invested in an unrealized cause and involves the sacrifice of ordinary life.

Katherine Angel has recently challenged contemporary conceptions of erotic desire by suggesting that sex is a learning process in which we discover what it is to be a person. This paper brings her suggestion to bear on Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit. It offers an interpretation of what Hegel calls ‘immediate desire’ and the experience an immediately desiring consciousness makes by reading a key paragraph through the lens of erotic desire. What the paper hopes to show is that Hegel’s analysis of the experience of desire and the example of sexual encounters can be mutually illuminating.

In 1780 Frederick II pushed the Prussian Academy to put forward a controversial question for a public essay contest: “Is it useful for the people to be deceived, be it by leading it into new errors or by confirming it in those which it upholds?” Although Hegel would have been too young to participate in the contest, he took two later opportunities to provide what would have been his answer. Whereas the Phenomenology of Spirit evaluates Enlightenment’s charge that religious faith is based on deception, the Philosophy of Right suggests that public opinion formation tends to lead to collective self-deception. In both versions of his answer, however, Hegel argues that it is impossible to deceive a people about its essence. In this paper I clarify what Hegel means by a people’s essence and why he thinks it impossible to deceive a people about it.

Hegel frequently identifies ethical life with a “second nature.” This strategy has puzzled those who assume that second nature represents a deficient appearance of ethical life, one that needs to be overcome, supplemented, or constantly challenged. I argue that Hegel identifies ethical life with a second nature because he thinks that a social order only becomes a candidate for ethical life, if it provides a context conducive to the development of what I call “real habits.” First, I show that a criterion for a real habit can be found in Hegel's Anthropology, namely, that of liberation. Next, I explain how the state, as Hegel analyzes it in the Philosophy of Right, provides such an environment by enabling trust toward and within it. I then consider two literary examples of contexts that fail to be similarly supportive—Coates' Between the World and Me and Atwood's Handmaid's Tale—concluding with reasons for thinking that real habits are an integral part of ethical life.

In this paper I ask why Hegel considers history’s “slaughter bench” to be one its redeemable features and how this is compatible with his conception of human value, specifically his simultaneous insistence that human beings are not to be regarded as ever mere means for historical development, but as ends-in-themselves. I answer these questions by comparing his conception of human value to that in Kant’s formula of humanity, to which Hegel clearly alludes, and situating Hegel’s conception inside his philosophy of history. What I argue is that Hegel thinks human beings are never mere means because they aim at freedom simply in virtue of holding convictions, however misguided these may be, in this way sharing in the aim of history’s own development. I conclude by bringing Hegel’s account of human sacrifice to bear on W. G. Sebald’s On the Natural History of Destruction.

Hegel's Science of Logic tracks the self-contained and self-generated development of what Hegel calls the concept. My question is: can the concept in the Logic surprise itself? I argue that the answer to that question is yes—the concept can surprise itself when it rediscovers itself in a place it did not expect to be. I first clarify the kind of perspective that the Logic asks us as readers to occupy and its difference from the perspective inside the ‘opposition’ of consciousness. I then provide an example of the concept's self-surprise, namely, the transition from subjective to realized purpose in the Subjective Logic. I conclude by drawing out some implications of self-surprise for Hegel's method in the Logic and in the subsequent Realphilosophie.

In the Preface to the Philosophy of Right, Hegel draws a favorable comparison between his project and Plato’s Republic, while making a critical comment about an example taken from Plato’s Laws. In this paper we investigate what Hegel’s assessment of Plato’s two texts in political philosophy illuminates about his conception of ethical education and the extent to which his own method allows a philosopher to contribute to the process of making people good. We show that although Hegel agrees with Plato that one becomes good by becoming “a citizen in a state with good laws” (PR §153), he believes that philosophy must remain faithful to its limited role in determining what these are going to be.