I. Descent and alliance: Hegel's articulations of kinship and the family

In her seminal essay Antigone's Claim: Kinship Between Life and Death (Reference Butler2000), Judith Butler argues that Antigone disturbs rather than represents the laws of ‘blood relationships’ [Blutsverwandtschaft] as Hegel would have it. ‘Antigone's father is her brother, since they both share a mother in Jocasta, and her brothers are her nephews, sons of her brother-father, Oedipus’, so she is ‘caught in a web of relations that produce no coherent position in kinship’ (Butler Reference Butler2000: 57). Antigone, in Butler's view, does not function as a figure ‘who articulates a prepolitical opposition to politics, representing kinship as the sphere that conditions the possibility of politics without ever entering into it’ (2000: 2). In contrast, she reveals the structural entanglements between kinship relations and the state, or the social and political character of kinship norms, and thus offers ‘an allegory for the crisis of kinship’ (2000: 24), or for the fragility and historical contingency of kinship norms.

Indeed, kinship norms were far from stable in Hegel's own time, so it seems that this aspect of his discussion of Antigone—unacknowledged by himself—is of central importance not only, as Butler argues, with respect to present struggles over kinship norms but also for an understanding of Hegel's philosophical re-articulation of the synchronic and diachronic dimensions of kinship. Far from being coherent, Hegel's theoretical accounts of kinship and the family are characterized by various ambivalences. Theoretical tensions exist not only between the Phenomenology of Spirit and the Philosophy of Right but also within the accounts given in these texts. As Kimberly Hutchings has argued with regard to the Philosophy of Right, Hegel ‘is in fact drawing our attention to the instability of the boundaries between family, civil society and the state, and also of the temporal boundary between the then of kinship and the now of the modern family’ (Hutchings Reference Hutchings and James2017: 109). So he neither presents trans-historical truths, nor does he give a historically adequate representation of the socio-cultural transformations of the period. Instead he renders these transformations intelligible by articulating them in specific ways. In fact, Hegel's idealized construction of the ethical character of marriage and his ideas about gender complementarity and the distinction between ‘kinship’ and ‘family’ contributed immensely to nineteenth-century discourses and political imaginaries. However, this can be claimed only in retrospect, while in Hegel's texts, these ideas were still in the making and thus fragile. This, I think, can be best shown by focusing on how Hegel deals with the supra-generational, diachronic dimensions of kinship relations and his de- and re-politicalization of genealogical thinking.

In the widely read sections on the ‘ethical world’ and ‘ethical action’ in the Phenomenology of Spirit, Hegel distinguishes between a female ‘divine law’ that represents the imperatives of consanguine kinship and a ‘human law’ or the imperatives of the political community. Both laws, according to Hegel, belong to what he calls the ‘ethical order’, but in his view the ‘ethical life’ of the divine law of the family is something particular, namely ‘negative ethical life’ (PhG: §458, 275).Footnote ⁵ This is the case because the ethical order is, in principle, always geared toward universality, and transcends the particularistic realm of kinship or family relations. In so far as they are members of a family, individuals are kin, not citizens, and there is only one action, according to Hegel, that belongs to the realm of kinship relations and that can be conceived of as a ‘positive ethical action’ (PhG: §453, 271). This is the burial through which the ‘[b]lood-relationship supplements … the abstract natural movement by adding to it the movement of consciousness’ (PhG: §452, 271). The family, as Hegel puts it, ‘weds the blood-relation to the bosom of the earth’ (PhG: §452, 271), and he conceives of the family as a ‘natural ethical community’ (PhG: §450, 268). The constitutive ‘blood relationships’ through which the family is structured, according to Hegel's account in the Phenomenology, are the relations between husband and wife, parents and children, and brother and sister. The brother is thereby a liminal figure because he is destined to transgress the order of the family and, as a male citizen, ‘does not belong to the [f]amily’ (PhG: §451, 269). As an adult, he ‘passes from the divine law, within whose sphere he lived, over to the human law. But the sister becomes, or the wife remains, the head of the household and guardian of the divine law’ (PhG: §459, 275).

In these sections, Hegel largely ignores the complex genealogical relations that are at stake in Antigone's burial of Polynices, and reduces kinship relations to marital, parental and sibling relations. He ignores the fact that the central conflict between Antigone and Creon is a conflict between an uncle and his niece, thus playing beyond the limits of the nuclear family. He neglects Antigone's relation to her sister Ismene, and omits Antigone's troubled ancestry and the genealogical complexity of her relation to her multiple brothers. Indeed, Hegel is reluctant to address the problem of genealogy or the ‘question of what separates one generation from another’, although this question is ‘central to Antigone's destiny’ because it ‘is precisely the one that Oedipus had confounded’ (Chanter Reference Chanter, Hutchings and Pulkkinen2010: 68) when he fathered Antigone with his mother Jocasta.

However, even if Hegel truncates Sophocles's problematic, and introduces an understanding of the family as a purely synchronic structure, a careful analysis of his texts reveals that he cannot fully avoid addressing questions of genealogy and diachronic kinship relations. This is the case when he briefly refers to the ‘people’ or the ‘nation’, understood as a genealogical continuum that needs to be reproduced. The relation between husband and wife, Hegel claims,

The procreation of children must thus be seen as a broader reproductive process that transgresses the boundaries of the nuclear family. Hegel, however, does not further elaborate on the relation between the ‘family’ and the ‘nation’ in this paragraph. Paradoxically, the whole issue of reproduction, which appears to be the theoretical hinge between these notions, is largely absent from his reflections on kinship and the family. It surfaces only at the margins of his text, for example when Hegel privileges the ethical character of the brother-sister relation because it is void of desire and does not include reproductive relations. Brother and sister, Hegel argues,

Reproduction, here, is mentioned negatively as the impossibility of incest which—from the perspective of textual coherence—is only possible because Hegel has omitted the question of Antigone's descent.

In the Philosophy of Right, Hegel articulates kinship and family relations in a different way. In the sections on the family and civil society, ‘family’ and ‘kinship’ are no longer equated. In contrast, Hegel now conceives of ‘blood relationships’ as a specific form of collective, which is based on relations of descent and transcends the nuclear family. It is a form of relatedness that is distinct from the family which, in Hegel's view, constitutes itself as an ‘ethical’ unit precisely through its distinction from the purely ‘natural’ relation of consanguine kinship. ‘When a marriage takes place’, Hegel argues, ‘a new family is constituted, and this is self-sufficient for itself in relation to the kinship groups [Stämme] or houses from which it originated; its links with the latter are based on the natural blood relationship, but the new family is based on ethical love’ (PR: §172, 209).

Hegel elaborates on the distinction between kinship and family in three respects, namely with regard firstly to the meaning of marriage and gender relations within marriage, secondly to the management of property, and thirdly to the education of children. Again, as in the Phenomenology, Hegel conceives of the family primarily as a synchronic structure and neglects the diachronic dimension of kinship relations. This dimension only enters the picture on a few occasions, when Hegel touches upon the issue of reproduction. In §§161 and 173, he mentions the ‘actuality of the species [Gattung] and its process’ (PR: §161, 200), and the ‘process which runs on into the infinite progression of generations which produce and presuppose one another’ (PR: §173, 210–11) as the natural aspect of marriage. In §168, Hegel again refers to the prohibition of incest, and builds on an argument about degeneration.Footnote ⁷

In addition, however, Hegel explicitly discusses kinship relations that exceed the nuclear family in the Philosophy of Right with regard to property rights and poverty. According to Hegel, the nuclear family as constituted through marriage sets itself apart from the broader economy of kinship: ‘The property of an individual is … essentially connected with his marital relationship, and only more distantly connected with his kinship group or house’ (PR: §172, 209–10). Hegel obviously devalues property relations among extended kin groups in order to establish a certain understanding of familial economy. The decline of ‘kinship’ for Hegel appears to be a precondition for civil society, the social arrangement in which male individuals act within the ‘system of all-round interdependence’ and pursue their ‘selfish end’ (PR: §183, 221). However, Hegel's demarcations remain fragile, and are counterfactual insofar as marriages between relatives and the economic meaning of extended kinship networks did not decline in the nineteenth century but, on the contrary, increased (Sabean Reference Sabean1998; Sabean and Teuscher Reference Sabean, Teuscher, Johnson, Jussen and Sabean2013; Engelstein Reference Engelstein2017). In particular, Hegel's account of family property reveals this fragility, and ‘creates problems for his distinctions between family and civil society and between family and state’ (Hutchings Reference Hutchings and James2017: 107). This is the case because in the management of family property, which men as heads of family can dispose of as if it were individual property, their roles as husbands and fathers within the family coincide with that of bourgeois individuals in civil society, and the state—by regulating the management of family property, for example through inheritance law—clearly intervenes in the family.Footnote ⁸

In addition, broader kinship relations beyond the nuclear family surface in the Philosophy of Right in a negative way—namely in the form of unjustified property claims or as an absence and deficiency that makes itself felt when economic subsistence fails—in poverty. In this case, Hegel argues, it becomes clear not only that the ‘natural means of acquisition’ have been destroyed but that civil society also ‘dissolves the bond of the family in its wider sense as a kinship group’ (PR: §241, 265). Extended kinship relations are here again addressed from an economic point of view, not with regard to the intergenerational transmission of property but as a specific set of economic relations that guarantees the subsistence of its members. In so far as this economy has collapsed under the conditions of capitalist production and commodity exchange, the state, according to Hegel, acquires the task of providing an existential minimum. The state thereby ‘takes over the role of the family’ and absorbs the patriarchal authority, i.e. the power of reprehension and education with respect to the poor's ‘laziness, viciousness, and other vices to which their predicament and sense of wrong give rise’ (PR: §241, 265). However, the state is unable to fully replace the economic function of broader kinship networks. This is not only the case because Hegel is opposed to ‘public redistribution of both wealth and labor, leaving civil society's network of economic interdependence to function without direct state administration’ (Whitt Reference Whitt2013: 265). The state ‘is simply unable to provide an objective, universal or complete solution’ to inequality and the emergence of the ‘rabble’ because its institutions, were they to operate within civil society, would ‘risk conforming to the contingency, partiality, and subjectivity of that sphere’ (265). Thus the state can neither establish ‘real’ socio-economic equality nor replace kinship-based subsistence economies. The same holds for the corporations that act ‘as a voluntary “second family”’ (265). They cannot be a substitute for familial relations because they act on the grounds of ‘objective qualification of skill and rectitude’ (Hegel, quoted by Whitt Reference Whitt2013: 265). The corporations thus require an individual who has been educated, and they are based on a logic of exclusion that differs significantly from that of kinship relations.

To sum up, in both the Phenomenology of Spirit and the Philosophy of Right, Hegel's theory of the family hinges on a certain understanding of supra-generational kinship relations that are at the same time de-politicized and re-politicized with regard to political economy, the state and the genealogical continuum of the nation. In addition, the very distinction between ‘family’ and ‘kinship’ articulates a politicized hierarchy between modern and traditional, European and non-European modes of living in so far as Hegel constantly distinguishes the nuclear family as he construes it from earlier and geographically distant forms of kinship.Footnote ⁹ His understanding of gender relations, family and kinship thus is also invested with geopolitical meanings. This holds for his appropriation of Antigone too. As Tina Chanter has argued, Antigone is a racialized figure in so far as Hegel associates her ‘with the earlier Greek gods, rather than the later’ and ‘aligns Antigone with the savagery of these gods of Eastern heritage—those misshapen, formless gods of another race [Geschlecht]’ (Chanter Reference Chanter, Hutchings and Pulkkinen2010: 73). So, although Hegel does not refer explicitly to geopolitics or ‘race’, these issues impact on his articulations of family and kinship relations.

In the next part, I will turn to Hegel's section on anthropology in the Philosophy of Spirit,Footnote ¹⁰ in which he develops his understanding of racial diversity. There, Hegel does not refer to kinship or family relations, but his critique of the genealogical concept of race corresponds with his negative treatment of genealogy in his discussion of these issues. However, I will show that Hegel develops an alternative understanding of racial descent and belonging which structures his territorialized understanding of history.

II. Genealogy and territory: Hegel's concept of race

When in the late eighteenth century, monogenists and polygenists struggled over the question of whether humankind could be traced back to one single origin or whether multiple origins—and thus multiple kinds of humans—needed to be assumed, they all took it that clear political and moral consequences followed from their genealogical accounts. Hegel, however, challenges this assumption in the Philosophy of Spirit, and rejects any genealogical argument with regard to racial hierarchies. This critique of genealogical thinking correlates with his neglect and devaluation of diachronic kinship relations, both in the Phenomenology and the Philosophy of Right, and his critique of political privilege based on descent.Footnote ¹¹ Hegel presents his own take on the issue of what he calls ‘race diversities’ based on a specific understanding of descent which does not refer to reproductive processes but to the generative process of the earth itself. This account of racial diversity, albeit condensed in a short paragraph and addition in the section that deals with the ‘natural’ and the ‘feeling soul’ (two stages in the development of the spirit out of nature which precede the constitution of consciousness and the more complex forms of spirit), impacts hugely on his understanding of world history and the development of the spirit.Footnote ¹²

In §393 of the Philosophy of Spirit, Hegel contends that

Hegel is referring here to the race discourse that had developed during the mid-eighteenth century and played a central role in the emergence of ‘anthropology’ as a distinct field of knowledge (Duchet Reference Duchet1971). He does not question the political-epistemic project of distinguishing and classifying ‘races’, but questions a genealogical definition according to which the concept of race refers to hereditary differences transmitted through reproduction. In the addition to Hegel's paragraph, we read that ‘descent affords no ground for granting or denying freedom and dominion to human beings’ (EM: §393A, 41). ‘Man’, Hegel claims, ‘is implicitly rational; herein lies the possibility of equal justice for all men and the futility of a rigid distinction between races [Menschengattungen] that have rights and those that have none’ (EM: §393A, 41). This statement is directed against a genealogical concept of race which refers to the transmission of physical and mental features through processes of reproduction—in particular Kant, who argued that the concept of race designates hereditary differences which are always transmitted equally by both parents, in contrast to differences which he calls varieties and variations (Bernasconi Reference Bernasconi, Ward and Lott2002; Lagier Reference Lagier2004).

Instead, Hegel claims that ‘diversities of race’ belong to the ‘natural soul’ and are ‘connected with the geographical differences of the soilFootnote ¹⁴ where human beings are gathered together in masses’ (EM: §393A, 41). On the basis of the distinction between the ‘old’ and the ‘new’ world, Hegel gives a brief sketch of the landscapes of Africa, Asia and Europe, which in a nutshell entails his argument about the correspondence between ‘physical’ and ‘mental’ differences among the races and the geographical circumstances that constitute them. Africa, in Hegel's account, ‘appears as a land mass belonging to a compact unity, as a lofty mountain range shutting off the coast’ (EM: §393A, 41); Asia is characterized by ‘the antithesis of highlands and great valleys irrigated by broad rivers; while the third, Europe, reveals the unity of the undifferentiated unity of Africa and the unmediated antithesis of Asia’ (EM: §393A, 41). Against the backdrop of the underlying conceptual pattern of thesis, antithesis and synthesis, it comes as no surprise that for Hegel it is only ‘in the Caucasian race that spirit first attains to absolute unity with itself’ and ‘enters into complete opposition to the life of Nature’ (EM: §393A,44). In Africa, spirit is, according to Hegel, in contrast ‘quite dormant, remaining sunk within itself and making no progress, and thus corresponding to the compact, differenceless mass of the African continent’ (EM: §393A, 43).Footnote ¹⁵ What is most noteworthy here is that whereas Kant's concept of race relied on Buffon's notion of the species as a reproductive continuum and the debates among naturalists of the late eighteenth century on the specificity of ‘living’ nature, Hegel's concept refers not to the emerging life sciences but to the sciences of geology and geography.

This, however, does not mean that he rejects any genealogical considerations. On the contrary, his spatial account of racial diversity includes a temporal and genealogical dimension as well, so that as a result geographical space and the potential for ‘historical’ development coincide. Geological time as conceived of in the contemporary debates on the historicity of the earth therefore plays a central role in Hegel's argument. Since the late seventeenth century, research on fossils and the reconstruction of the volcanic activities of the earth on the basis of geological stratification and mountains had led to scrutiny of Biblical notions of time, such as the contention that the Creation took seven days. As a consequence, the temporal horizons of the histories of the earth and of humanity were considerably broadened—a process that was of central importance for the formation of the sciences of life and of the modern understanding of ‘history’. Hegel refers to these debates in the Philosophy of Nature when he characterizes the earth as an organism which is not actually living, because its ‘process of formation lies in the past’ (EN: §339, 278).Footnote ¹⁶ The earth, according to Hegel, is shaped through a temporal process that has produced a spatial differentiation and thus an ‘external system’ of different members (EN: §339, 278). He writes: ‘That the Earth has had a history, i.e. that its constitution is the result of successive changes, the direct evidence of this is in the constitution itself. It points to a series of tremendous revolutions belonging to a remote past’ (EN: §339A, 280). Because the history of the earth has come to an end, its present state is relatively stable so that, for Hegel, it seems to be more appropriate to focus on the presently existing spatial differences than on the past processes through which they emerged. ‘The point of interest’, we read, ‘is not to determine how things were millions of years ago (and in the matter of years one can be generous); the interest is confined to what is there before us—to this system of distinct formations’ (EN: §339, 283). Still, the ‘distinct formations’, including the effects they have on the various populations or ‘races’, are in principle the result of long-term temporal processes. So even if the task of physical geography, in Hegel's view, is to inquire into the ‘particular formations of the Earth’ and to study the ‘various genera and species which are peculiar to each continent’ (EN: §339, 284), this includes a temporal perspective.

After all, the entire project of physical geography that Hegel refers to is not strictly opposed to the study of temporal processes. Kant himself, being one of the first scholars who lectured on geography and contributed immensely to the formation of this new field of knowledge, introduced a genealogical perspective (Church Reference Church, Elden and Mendieta2011). Physical geography, Kant stated, should not be understood as an ‘inventory of separate natural things’ but should represent ‘natural things according to their kinships and families, according to their place of birth, or the locations in which Nature has placed them’ (Kant Reference Kant and Vollmer1801: 10).Footnote ¹⁷ This plea for a genealogical reconstruction of the emergence of natural entities and their synchronic and diachronic interrelations was widely adopted. In particular, Kant's critique of ‘natural description’ as a purely artificial and classificatory endeavour—which should, as he explained in his essay Of the different races of human beings (1775),Footnote ¹⁸ be replaced by a true ‘natural history’ that reveals the ‘physical truth’ of natural beings—had a huge impact on the development of geography. ‘Following Kant’, Malcolm Nicolson states, ‘German geographers assumed the existence of a functional interrelation between all of the individual phenomena of the earth's surface’ (Nicolson Reference Nicolson and Cunningham1990: 170). When Hegel refers to physical geography, he can thus build on the genealogical perspective that Kant had formulated. Indeed, the spatial or geographical differences he refers to in his account of ‘race diversities’ do have a genealogical dimension.

The genealogical and the geographic concepts of race are thus not strictly opposed; both refer to an understanding of temporal development through which currently existing differences have been generated. While the Kantian perspective highlights the reproductive relations through which heredity works, in Hegel's account the notion of the earth as an organism that generates a differentiated structure of members plays a central role. This notion can be found not only in Hegel's philosophy of nature but also in Henrik Steffens' account of racial hierarchies. In his Anthropologie Steffens conceives of the earth as a ‘total organism’, thus as a hierarchical structure consisting of various interrelated members. ‘As in the structure of an animal,’ Steffens writes,

As the context makes clear, Steffens thinks that the earth generates human beings in the form of different ‘races’ corresponding to the respective region. The ‘races’, he argues, are built ‘into any region’ (Reference Steffens1922: 274) and situated within the general structure of the organism of the earth. This corresponds to Hegel's idea that the ‘nature-governed spirits’ into which the ‘general natural soul’ collapses ‘give expression to the nature of the geographical continents’ (EN: §393, 40). Hegel's geography-based concept of race and his idea of a moral and cultural expressivity of the ‘soil’ thus involve a genealogical narration in which the earth itself is placed centre stage. ‘Descent’ in this framework does not refer to reproductive processes but has a territorial meaning. The territory as Hegel conceives it, however, binds the individual to the collective entity called ‘race’ just as much as heredity does in the Kantian perspective.

The fact that territory and space play the principal role in Hegel's account of race is in no way surprising. Already in François Bernier's essay Nouvelle division de la terre par des espèces ou races qui l'habitent (Reference Bernier1684), one of the earliest documents in which the term ‘race’ was used to refer to different global populations, the earth was constituted as a global but stratified space. What is new, however, is that Hegel temporalizes the global space and spatializes temporal-historical developments. In doing this, he explicitly distances himself from any analogy between the history of the earth and human history, claiming that ‘the efforts of those who would connect the evolutionary epochs of the Earth with the epochs of human history must be pronounced invalid’ (EN: §392A, 38). It is not the temporality of the earth itself that Hegel considers anthropologically relevant, but the geographically distinguished modes in which temporality unfolds. His idea that the development of mental faculties and that of spirit itself are bound to a specific territory includes the assumption that temporality does not evolve independently of geographical space and so cannot acquire everywhere the form of ‘history’ or ‘world history’. ‘World history’, according to Hegel, occurs only in the region of the so-called Caucasian race. Hegel's understanding of temporality, it follows, is always already territorialized. While a certain mode of temporality—historicity—elevates the Europeans above other ‘races’, their privileged status is, in fact, determined through their spatial position. In fact, Hegel's Eurocentrism is based on a theory of temporalized space, or territorialized temporality. With regard to genealogy, it follows that his account of racial diversity operates on two levels. On the one hand, Hegel explicitly rejects a proto-biological, genealogical understanding of race as based on reproduction and heredity. On the other hand, he introduces an understanding of genealogy according to which ‘races’ are produced and reproduced by the earth itself. So, as in his discussion of kinship and the family, Hegel is critical of the social and political meaning of supra-generational reproductive relations but at the same time he conceives of a supra-human generative power, the earth.

III. Genealogy and reproduction: Hegel on sexual difference

Hegel is reluctant to refer to relations of reproduction both in his account of racial diversity and in his theory of the family. In the Philosophy of Nature, however, he develops a theory of sexual reproduction that underlies the accounts of kinship and the family, and an understanding of temporal development that structures his understanding of racial diversity.

When the concept of reproduction emerged in the natural history disputes over generation in the eighteenth century (Müller-Wille and Rheinberger Reference Müller-Wille and Rheinberger2007; Lettow Reference Lettow2014b), it signalled an epistemic change in perspective. Scientific curiosity increasingly focused on long-term, intergenerational processes, so that living beings, as a consequence, acquired a past. They came to be seen as part of a ‘line leading back through parents, grandparents and all the monotonous ancestry by which the species was perpetuated’ (Jacob Reference Jacob1989: 131). The genealogical aspects of reproductive processes were thus increasingly studied. Schelling, in his philosophy of nature, prominently adopted the concept of reproduction and transformed it into a central philosophical concept designating the general dynamics of nature. Hegel's usage of the concept of reproduction, however, is more restricted. In contrast to Schelling's organic understanding of nature, Hegel claims that at the lower stages of mechanics and physics, nature has not yet constituted itself as ‘life’ and thus does not reproduce itself. For Hegel, the chemical process designates the transition from physics to organic physics. It therefore has ‘an appearance of vitality … but it is destroyed in the product’ (EN: §335A, 269). This means that chemical processes are indeed productive but not reproductive in so far as ‘the individual body in its immediacy is not only produced by the process but also destroyed by it’ (EN: §335, 269). They cannot be conceived of from a genealogical perspective because ‘the beginning and the end of the process are separate and distinct’ (EN: §335, 269), i.e., the products that result from a chemical process do not continue the process or initiate it anew. ‘Life’ in the proper sense of the word, for Hegel, only emerges at the stage of plant nature ‘where the vital principle gathers itself into a point and this point sustains and produces itself, repels itself, and produces new points’ (EN: §342A, 303). Reproduction, at the stage of plant nature, still operates as an asexual process, however.Footnote ¹⁹

According to Hegel, growth, regeneration and the generation of new individuals are inseparable at this stage, so that the ‘process of formation and of reproduction of the singular individual in this way coincides with the process of the genus and is a perennial production of new individuals’ (EN: §344, 305). This process, we read in the addition to §345, is ‘not mediated by opposition’ (EN: §345A, 312). So in contrast to Schelling, Hegel does not hold the view that nature in general is a process of reproduction and structured through a dualism of the sexes that is both the precondition and result of this infinite process. Hegel's philosophy of nature is structured through the process of spirit, which divests itself [sich entäußern] into nature, and proceeds in various stages in order to return from nature into itself. Although both Schelling and Hegel conceived of ‘sexual difference as the manifestation of fundamental polarities or oppositions within nature’ (Stone Reference Stone and Lettow2014: 260), their accounts differ. Most importantly, sexual reproduction, in Hegel's view, requires two sexually different individuals, not just sexually different organs that belong to a single organism:

Because plants, in Hegel's view, lack this kind of sexual difference, he considers a plant to be only a ‘multiplication of itself’ (EN: §348A, 345).

In so far as sexual reproduction in the full sense, for Hegel, emerges only in ‘animal nature’, it is always mediated by forms of consciousness. In particular, it functions through the experience of need and want, which draws the two different but complementary individuals to each other. It is a relation to the other ‘which at the same time belongs to the same genus [Gattung], and in which the individual achieves self-feeling in the act of feeling itself in the other’ (EN: §355A, 376–77). As this sentence and the following make perfectly clear, the sexual encounter and reproductive unification of the two sexes is the first form of intersubjectivity that Hegel conceives. It is a relation to an Other who is understood simultaneously as equal and different, and through which the individual develops a perception of itself. Hegel obviously is not referring to animals alone but to human interaction as well. ‘Through the male and femaleFootnote ²⁰ there emerges a determination of the entire structure, a different habitus which, in humans,Footnote ²¹ also extends to the spiritual sphere and becomes a distinct natural feature’ (EN: §355A, 377). As in Hegel's reflections on love and marriage in the Philosophy of Right, the dualism of the sexes in the Philosophy of Nature is geared towards unification. ‘Their [the sexes’] union is the disappearance of the sexes into which the simple genus has developed’ (EN: §369A, 412). The sexes share an ‘original identity’ (EN: §369A, 412) which, however, is expressed differently. While for the woman the essential is that which is ‘indifferent’,Footnote ²² for the man it is ‘the moment of duality, the opposition’ (EN: §369A, 413). This distinction, for Hegel, translates into the difference between receptivity and activity—the main difference that structures his ideas about masculinity and femininity in the Phenomenology and the Philosophy of Right, where the male is conceived of as being ‘in its external relation … powerful and active’, the female as being ‘passive and subjective’ (PR: §166, 206).

Sexual reproduction, one can conclude, lies at the heart of Hegel's construction of complementary but hierarchical gender relations. Although, for Hegel, sexual difference as required by and constituted through reproduction is primarily a ‘natural’ difference, the ‘sexual relation [das Geschlechtsverhältnis] acquires in the family its spiritual and ethical meaning and determination’,Footnote ²³ as he puts it (EM: §397, 64). This is the historically specific form of alliance and descent that is institutionalized in the ‘family’ and structured through the gender complementarity that Hegel construes in the Phenomenology and in the Philosophy of Right. As Alison Stone has put it, the philosophy of nature ‘feeds through into his Philosophy of Mind’ (Stone Reference Stone, Hutchings and Pulkkinen2010: 219) and also structures his position in the Philosophy of Right. From the perspective of the philosophy of nature, the family thus appears to be primarily a reproductive unit.

In addition, in the philosophy of nature, the impact that genealogical and reproductive thought has on Hegel's overall philosophical method and narration is revealed. In particular, the notion of ‘development’ refers to a genealogical process in which new ‘figures’ emerge on the basis of their predecessors and together form a line of succession. The temporalized understanding of ‘development’ that Hegel relies on thus reveals how much his philosophy owes to natural history and to the disputes about procreation and generation that shaped contemporary scientific, literary and philosophical discourses. Whereas in preformation theory, ‘development’ and ‘evolution’ had designated a non-temporal process of the unfolding of ‘germs’, a temporalized understanding of developmental processes had been argued for by advocates of epigenesis since the mid-eighteenth century.Footnote ²⁴ Hegel's claim that nature is a ‘system of stages, one arising necessarily from the other and being the proximate truth of the stage from which it results’ (EN: §249, 20) builds on a genealogical perspective that focuses on the succession of the ‘stages’ that form a quasi-lineage. It resonates with epigenetic views in so far as every stage is conceived of as being the result of the cooperation of opposed forces, through which something new is generated, and in particular with Goethe's morphology.Footnote ²⁵ Hegel, however, distances himself again from a simple analogy with natural history and stresses that the ‘stages’ he has in mind are not ‘generated naturally out of the other’ (EN: §249, 20). He contends that ‘Metamorphosis pertains only to the Notion as such, since only its alteration is development’ (EN: §249, 20). In Hegel's view, the understanding of metamorphosis as a purely conceptual process is important if one wants to avoid cosmological speculation about the genesis and genealogy of living beings. ‘It has been’, he writes, ‘an inept conception of ancient and also recent Philosophy of Nature to regard the progression and transition of one natural form and sphere into a higher as an outwardly-actual production…’ (EN: §249R, 20). The idea that plants and animals emerge from water, or ‘the origination of the more highly developed animal organisms from the lower, and so on’ is, according to Hegel, simply ‘nebulous’ (EN: §249R, 20). It is, he argues, the ‘dialectical Notion which leads forward the stages’ (EN: §249R, 20). Hegel thus transposes the ideas of temporal development and of genealogical succession into his philosophical narration so that ‘development’ refers first and foremost to the process of the spirit itself. As I have shown in the previous section, for Hegel the only possible agent of the unfolding of spirit in world history is the Caucasian race as it emerges in a certain world region. Hegel's racialized and territorialized understanding of history, it follows, thus also relies upon a philosophical adaptation of the concept of reproduction although, in contrast to his understanding of the family, in a different, metonymic sense.