León Antonio Heim

In this text, I interpret Hegel’s concept of the family within the context of his theory of freedom. I take family life to entail a certain tension between freedom and nature that makes it necessary to reflect on the role of nature in our understanding of the family. For this, I examine two ways of understanding the family’s relation to nature, a conser- vative and a liberal one, to then offer a third, dialectical way as an alternative. My central argument is that Hegel’s concept of the family can be read as a response to the problem of our entanglement with nature and is thereby an integral part of his theory of ethical life and freedom. For this, I outline the normative principle underlying Hegel’s family concept that I will call ‘the notion of a self-conscious genus-process’ (Gattungsprozess). This notion enables an immanent critique of Hegel’s concept of the family without abandoning his dialectical conception of the relationship between freedom and nature.

The concept of autonomy, once central to the self-understanding of modern philosophy, is under attack from at least two sides: (1) on the one side, there is a reawakened interest in naturalist philosophy, questioning the hybris of human self-understanding as being “above nature” and essentially free and rational; (2) on the other side, there is the feminist critique of autonomy as the wrongful generalization of a certain masculine/western understanding of the subject as independent person. Both aim at the core of what the term “autonomy” normatively stands for: the capacity for rational self-determination. We inherit this concept of autonomy from Kant and encounter a variety of post-Kantian variations of it. In my paper, I will turn to Hegel in order to show that, although conceptualizing autonomy as rational self-determination, in his Philosophy of Nature, he incorporates elements of both naturalism and relational autonomy. Under revision, his concept of spirit provides us with a picture of the human as self-conscious animal or nature grasping itself. His notion of autonomy then turns out to be surprisingly fruitful for current debates, enabling us to understand our animalistic nature and our fundamental interdependency in a way that is not opposed to such concepts as rationality, freedom, and autonomy. As I will try to show, re-reading Hegel thus allows us to reconceptualize autonomy in a way that accords with its critics.