León Antonio Heim

Such love, though it expends itself in generosity and thoughtfulness, though it give birth to visions and to great poetry, remains among the sharpest expressions of self-interest. Not until it has passed through a long servitude, through its own self-hatred, through mockery, through great doubts, can it take its place among the loyalties.most readers will be at least generally familiar with the details of Hegel’s so-called struggle for recognition, his account of the emergence of communal life in chapter 4 of the Phenomenology of Spirit. “Consciousness,” the argument’s protagonist, at a certain stage interprets its desire for wisdom as a desire for the regard of another; it first tries to secure it by forcing the..

Throughout the history of philosophy, numerous philosophers have formulated theories about the connection between law and freedom. However, few have suggested that freedom and love are inherently connected. According to Hegel, the family and marriage represent the initial tangible manifestation of freedom, embodied in ethical and self-conscious love. This contentious thesis pertains to Hegel’s endorsement of the modern bourgeois family and his assertion regarding a compulsory and heteronormative conception of conjugal love. I analyse Hegel’s family theory in what follows, emphasizing the marital relationship as delineated in Outlines of the Philosophy of Right. I examine the significance and ramifications of his dismissal of the marriage contract to illustrate how this creates a paradox. I propose an alternative interpretation of these passages by emphasizing the relationship between love and law within marital relations. I advocate the importance of law within the family and demonstrate its significance to marriage. I assert that Hegel’s understanding of the family, especially regarding marriage, highlights the tensions present in the complex relationship between the legal aspect of marriage as a contract and the ethical aspect rooted in self-conscious love. To achieve this, I firstly reconstruct Hegel’s conception of the family and explore his understanding of marriage as sexual drive, desire, passion and contract. Secondly, I explore Hegel’s notion of ethical and self-conscious love, examining the relationship between law and love to reveal the paradox of marriage. Third, I discuss Hegel’s views on divorce and marriage settlements to demonstrate why marriage cannot overcome the contract. Finally, I discuss why Hegel’s response to the issues he identifies in the theories of his contemporaries is inadequate and how marriage and conjugal love threaten freedom. My claim is that marriage entails a paradoxical relationship between love and law, which calls into question the suitability of marriage to realize freedom.

This book shows the fruitfulness of approaching key philosophical and political questions from a Marxist-feminist point of view. The idea is that different modes of production like capitalism and feudalism have structures -- 'relations of production' -- which shape and limit the potentials for human emancipation in general and women's freedom in particular. Capitalism is then understood as a framework within which other relations of oppression operate, with more or less salience in different times and places. Each of the essays takes this basic approach to key philosophical questions about freedom, rationality and human nature.

The legacy of the Platonic dialogues may well lie, not in any classical idealist “doctrine of forms,” but in an inquisitive stance towards the puzzle behind any such doctrine—how thought can be about anything at all. This Platonic puzzle may, however, yield a different guise of idealism that is recognizably diagnostic: it aims to dispel our worry about thought’s objectivity as a confusion, engendered by a self-alienation of thought. These themes of diagnosis and idealism resurface in Wittgenstein, who in his treatment of rules calls for an understanding of thought’s normativity from within. This is taken up by Cora Diamond, who urges philosophy to attend to thought’s real needs by exorcizing any desire for agreement with something other than itself. I argue that Wittgenstein and Diamond lead us back to Kant’s idealism, which identifies transcendental realism as the deep-seated prejudice at the root of the puzzle.