I. Clarifying Hegel’s claim about the incompleteness of childless marriage

Hegel’s discussion of the rational family, as readers of the text know well, constitutes the first section of his discussion of rational Ethical Life (PR: §§158–81). In it, he sets out his vision of what a rational family should look like, thereby coming to comment on the constitutive demands of the marital relationship (e.g., PR: §§161–69), on the significance and meaning of the marriage ceremony (esp. PR: §164, §164Z), on property relations within a marriage (PR: §§170–72),Footnote ⁵ on the division of labour within the household (esp. PR: §166, §166Z) and on the ‘raising of children (Erziehung der Kinder)’ (PR: §§173–80). In those remarks, he lays out his well-known critique of Kant’s understanding of marriage, as well as an equally well-known critique of Romantic understandings of the same issue—views that had, on Hegel’s view, misunderstood marriage as a form of contract (esp. PR: §161Z) or inappropriately de-emphasized the significance of the official marriage ceremony (cf. PR: §164A, §164Z).

As I have already expressed above, many of the views here now strike us as wildly controversial and problematic: Hegel’s discussion takes it as self-evident that marriage needs to be monogamous and heterosexual (PR: §167, §165 and passim), and that there should be a clear power imbalance between husband and wife (PR: §166, §166Z), with the husband as the head of the household and the wife as the primary caretaker for the children. Moreover, Hegel’s reasoning behind many of these points reveals even more problematic assumptions—e.g., about the cognitive capacities of women (esp. PR: §166Z), about the nature of sexual attraction (PR: §165), about the nature of childrearing (PR: §§165–67) and, in general, about the ‘ethical meaning (sittliche Bedeutung)’ of the allegedly natural differences between men and women (PR: §165).Footnote ⁶ In that way, Hegel’s discussion of marriage turns out to be a Russian doll of controversial views, stacking one questionable view on another, as we retrace his steps from his conclusions back to his premises.

Hegel’s views on the incompleteness of childless marriage seem to fit into this line-up of outdated views perfectly, at least on first glance. Indeed, his assertion that a marriage without children is incomplete and lacks, as he calls it, full objectivity appears very similar to a host of conservative views, familiar from historical and religious discourses, that seem to argue for the same conclusion: views, for instance, that argue that couples should procreate for the greater social good, or that they are under a biblical mandate to ‘go forth and multiply’ or that a similar mandate is somehow imposed on them by nature (however one wants to flesh out the details of those respective views).Footnote ⁷ In that way, Hegel’s position seems ab initio conservative and inimical to the procreative autonomy that modern marital couples claim for themselves.

But before we make any definitive determination as to whether Hegel fits this conservative mould or not, we need to lay out the characteristics of Hegel’s view in some more detail. After all: while there are certainly broad resonances between Hegel’s views and the views I have just gestured at, it is the argumentative and philosophical details that need to be decisive here. In particular, I think that we need to pay attention to three points.

The first point is this: read carefully, Hegel holds the view that having children is a requirement flowing out of the relationship between the marital partners themselves—i.e., out of their committed ‘relationship of love (das Verhältnis der Liebe)’ (PR: §173Z). It is this committed relationship that, in a yet to be clarified way, needs to be completed by having children, and that—if, by contrast, left childless—remains in some ways incomplete: ‘The relationship of love is not yet objective between man and woman—for, while their substantial unity exists in feeling, it still lacks objectivity. Parents achieve this objectivity only in their children’ (PR: §173Z).

In that way, unlike some of the views we described above, Hegel’s view here hinges less on an external value requiring marital partners to have and raise children together (be it social utility, divine intention or natural obligation). Rather it rests on an immanent requirement of a committed love relationship itself. So while Hegel may or may not support, for example, the view that the raising and having of children has utility to the social whole,Footnote ⁸ the crucial point is that this view is not doing the argumentative heavy lifting here. Rather, the argument at issue in Hegel’s claim about childless marriage is that the norm of having and raising a child is immanent to the committed love relationship between the partners, and that there is, therefore, a sense in which marital partners let their commitment to one another down, if they decide to remain childless.

Moreover, and this is the second point to emphasize here, even this immanence needs to be understood with some subtlety and qualification. Hegel’s view here is not that having children together is the only constitutive element of marriage, such that a marriage without children would cease to be a marriage at all (in the way that a triangle losing its triangularity would cease to be a triangle). Hegel, instead, is explicit that marriage is constituted by more than just having children together: for him, it is, for instance, equally defined by the romantic and sexual recognition between the two partners which Hegel takes to be a type of recognition available nowhere outside of marriage (PR: §158).Footnote ⁹ In as much, then, as there might have been a worry that Hegel’s view reduces the idea of marriage to a mere procreative unit, this worry is unfounded. (Indeed, Hegel cuts off any attempt to reduce the definition or purpose of marriage to just one idea verbatim: ‘When the question is asked as to what should be viewed as the main purpose of marriage […] this main purpose is understood to mean which of the individual aspects of its reality must be accepted as the most essential one over the others. But none in itself constitutes the entire scope of its intrinsic content […] and one or the other aspect of its existence can be missing, without [entirely] destroying the essence of marriage’ (PR: §164A)).

If one wanted to clarify this further, the pertinent metaphor here, as always with Hegel, is the metaphor of an acorn growing into an oak tree: just as an incomplete—i.e., growing—oak tree is still very much an oak tree and encompasses some of the constitutive qualities of an oak tree, an (in Hegel’s eyes) incomplete—i.e., childless—marital love relationship is still very much a marital relationship and encompasses some of the constitutive qualities of this ethical institution. It is just that, as with the oak tree, not all of its qualities are fully realized, such that there remains an immanent requirement that is, as of that moment, unfulfilled and still wanting for realization.

A third, and last, point needs to be added to this. After all: so far, you might think that I have rather loosely spoken of ‘having (and raising) children together’ as the content of the immanent norm of marriage Hegel stipulates. But, obviously, this phrase allows for at least two different readings. On the one hand, one might think that what is at stake here is biological procreation narrowly conceived, such that marital couples will only fulfil this immanent requirement if they raise their own biological children. On the other hand, one might think that what is at stake here is biological and spiritual procreation more broadly conceived, such that marital couples could also fulfil the immanent requirement of their love relationship by raising an adopted child or the child of a close relative (a practice that was, as one should note, not at all uncommon in Hegel’s own time—one might remember Goethe’s famous novel on Elective Affinites or Wahlverwandtschaften in this context).Footnote ¹⁰

Given how much Hegel emphasizes that the rational family is the ethical site of the Gattungsprozess, i.e., of the natural perpetuation of the species (PR: §161, §161Z), it is easy to think that Hegel must have (only) biological procreation in mind here. On this kind of reading, the objective unity created by having and raising a child is only truly achieved if parents raise a child of their own, thereby literally unifying their genetic material in a new person. Adoptive parents would, on this understanding, still fall somewhat short of the objectivity achieved by having a child, and in that regard still be on the same level (or close to the same level) as a childless marriage is. Put into a short slogan: on this reading, only ‘natural’ families would count as ‘real’ families for Hegel.

But I do not think we need to read Hegel in this narrow way. Hegel’s view that ethical sex is only possible within the family does not, by itself, entail the reverse that the only way that a family can exist is through (ethical) sex. Indeed, throughout his discussion of the family, Hegel is adamant that, while the family is indeed the ethical place for sex (see also PR: §163Z), its defining characteristic is a ‘spiritual (geistige)’ (PR: §161) unity between the members of the family. Nature, in other words, should not be a strict determinant who can and cannot count as a family (which, of course, goes very well with Hegel’s more general view that, in a well-ordered society, ‘nature is deprived of [its] coercive force’ (PR: §324)—i.e., no longer serves as a limit on the possibilities of human freedom).Footnote ¹¹

A broader reading, thus, is to be preferred.Footnote ¹² On this broader reading, Hegel is committed to the view that parents can achieve the ‘objectivity’ in their child (PR: §173Z), even if that child is not their biological progeny. This reading has the further advantage that marital couples that, for biological reasons such as infertility, cannot have children together are not automatically excluded from having complete marriages; instead, by raising an adopted child, they would still be able to add lasting ‘objectivity’ to their relationship of love in the way that all other couples can.

With these three points taken together, a more subtle understanding of Hegel’s view of childless marriage has already emerged. As we have now seen, Hegel holds the view that the normativity of having and raising children is an immanent requirement of the love relationship between two married partners (not, e.g., externally imposed on couples by social, divine or natural command), that this immanence needs to be understood in a non-reductivist way (that allows for other constitutive facets of marriage), and that the fulfilment conditions for this immanent requirement are broad enough to include both natural and spiritual procreation.

With this view thus clarified, we can now turn to the question of how Hegel argues for it. This will still appear as a relevant task, for, while my clarification may have blunted its edges a little bit, Hegel’s claim remains deeply controversial. Many of us will want to resist the conclusion that a childless marriage is an incomplete relationship and that partners that decide not to have a child are missing out on a crucial component of their commitment to one another. So: does Hegel have an argument, and, if so, what is it?

II. Reconstructing Hegel’s argument for the incompleteness of childless marriage

Obviously, if Hegel has an argument for his view, it needs to hinge on the notion of ‘objectivity (Objektivität)’. After all: looking at the text of Hegel’s original claim, as we have already seen, he rather straightforwardly tells us that it is objectivity that a childless marriage is lacking: ‘The relationship of love is not yet objective (objektiv) between man and woman—for, while their substantial unity exists in feeling, it still lacks objectivity’ (PR: §173Z). And it is this objectivity that is gained by having and raising a child: ‘Parents obtain such objectivity only in children’ (PR: §173Z).Footnote ¹³ A little earlier in the text, and in an exactly similar spirit, Hegel tells us that it is by having children that parents overcome the ‘inwardness’ of their love relationship, instead giving it the character of an object that has existence ‘in and for itself’ (PR: §173).

This claim is repeated, in different iterations, in the student manuscripts from Hegel’s lectures on the subject. In the 1821–22 notes, somewhat recently edited by Hansgeorg Hoppe, we read—for instance—that ‘this inwardness (Innigkeit) [within marriage] comes to be objective only through community, which is a form of objectivity; yet the concentrated objectivity, which exists freely for itself, marriage reaches in children, through whom marriage only becomes fully complete’ (VPR Hoppe: 168). And in the 1819–20 notes, edited by Dieter Henrich, even though ‘objectivity’ is not mentioned verbatim, we read in a similar spirit that ‘The ethical unity within marriage becomes actual (wirklich) in children’ (VPR Henrich: 143).

Interpreting Hegel’s argument, then, will consist in figuring out what ‘objectivity’ is supposed to mean in this context. My proposal would be that Hegel has three distinct things in mind here, when he speaks of objectivity, such that his above statement (‘The relationship of love […] still lacks objectivity. Parents obtain such objectivity only in children’) is really best understood as containing three separate arguments, each built around one distinct sense of objectivity. Indeed, in line with what we have noted about the shape of Hegel’s argument above, each of these arguments will identify an intrinsic component of committed love and show that this component can only be fully actualized—and lastingly achieved—through having and raising children together (understood in the aforementioned broad sense in which spiritual and natural procreation is included).

The first argument is built around ‘objectivity’ in the sense of ‘firmness or stability’. Plausibly, Hegel thinks, it is a constitutive component of committed love that partners create conditions that stabilize their relationship against the arbitrary ups and downs of their feelings towards one another—i.e., that they give their relationship a certain independence from their own individual volitions (i.e., from their ‘disposition (Gesinnung)’ mentioned in PR: §173Z). After all: it is in the very nature of commitment that we seek to protect it, not only against disruption from the outside, but also—at least to a certain degree—from ourselves, and from the ups and downs of our own momentary intentions. Indeed, Hegel says explicitly in PR: §176 that we may consider it a right of a committed love relationship against its own participants that it is secured against the ‘mere opinion of disposition and the arbitrariness of momentary moods’ (PR: §176).

Of course, there are limits to this: committed love relationships do not require that we create literal ‘Ulysses contracts’, forcing togetherness even if one lastingly does not want to be together anymore. But committed love does require that we create milder forms of such structures, which make sure that backing out of one’s commitment requires some sustained willing (rather than being easily possible on the spur of the moment, e.g., after a fight or in the face of a fleeting infatuation with someone else).

Having and raising children together, Hegel thinks, is the ultimate version of creating exactly such structures of mild independence from the varying volitional ‘disposition’ of both partners (PR: §173Z, §176). After all: The ethical and psychological responsibilities of parenthood that emerge out of a joint project of care—the responsibilities to ‘nourish and educate’ (PR: §174)—are the ultimate stabilizing structure for a committed relationship, giving both partners a strong, yet not indefeasible (PR: §176f.), reason to stay together, even if they may, in the moment, no longer be so inclined. So, while having children together does not make the love relationship inescapable (something that Hegel would want to avoid, see PR: §176), it makes it so that sustained willing is a necessary requirement for exit.

Now, of course, one might immediately reply that there are other ways of bringing this specific volitional independence to a relationship—other ways, that is, than having and raising children together. Owning property such as a family home together, one might say, already grounds the relationship between the two marital partners in such a way that it becomes less vulnerable to the changing stances of individual disposition. In this case, it is the ethical and psychological forces of shared ownership that create a reason for the two partners to stay together, even if their individual volitions are momentarily pulling them apart: insulating the relationship from the ups and downs of individual disposition and binding the two partners in a way that makes a ‘spur of the moment’ withdrawal less likely. So, or so one might put the objection to Hegel here: if marriages can gain ‘objectivity’ (i.e., stability) through shared ownership, why is the joint care for a child still required?

There is clearly something correct to this worry, and we will have to come back to it in the next section of this paper. At least for the moment, though, it is worthwhile making the point here that, as Hegel himself explicitly discusses in the text, the psychological and ethical bonds created by property cannot be compared with the psychological and ethical bonds of parenthood. Comparing the bonds created by jointly owned property (Familienvermögen) and the bonds created by a joint project of care for a child, he writes: ‘While in property the unity [between the two marital partners] is a merely external affair (äußerliche Sache), it takes on a spiritual character in children, through whom the parents are loved and whom they love’ (PR: §173Z).

Hegel’s point here is that, while surely it might be true that individuals may feel compelled by their responsibilities towards, e.g., a shared home, it is clear that the psychological and ethical responsibilities towards a living and self-conscious—i.e., ‘spiritual (geistig)’ (PR: §173Z)—being (a child) lie on an entirely different level. After all, those psychological and ethical responsibilities involve a degree of reciprocity (‘through whom parents are loved and whom they love’ (PR: §173Z)) simply not involved in the relationship to jointly owned property, which renders these responsibilities more binding (and, through this, more stabilizing—i.e., ‘objective’ in the sense of the above argument).

This brings us to the second argument that is at issue here—an argument that is built around a second sense of ‘objectivity’, namely ‘clarity or transparency’: Plausibly, partners in a committed love relationship owe each other some transparency over who they are as people (esp. over their identity, their value commitments, etc.). After all: while a love relationship can certainly begin in physical and romantic attachment that does not require transparency between the partners, a committed relationship requires mutual honesty and clarity about the parties involved. It requires, in other words, that the participants in the relationship do not just rely on their ‘unspoken’ emotional and physical understanding of one another, but that they provide each other with some ‘self-conscious’ understanding (PR: §161Z), thereby creating an epistemically objective basis for their togetherness. (By the same token, and this makes the point just from another direction, lying to one’s long-term romantic partner about who one is not just a violation of a universal norm not to lie to others, but a violation of the special relationship that exists between the two partners—which makes such lies much worse).

And again, Hegel thinks, it is only through having and raising children together that this kind of mutual transparency can lastingly be achieved—i.e., that parents can put their relationship objectively ‘in front of one another (beide haben in ihm ihre Liebe vor sich)’ (PR: §173Z). After all: it seems persuasive that raising children challenges parents to spell out their identities and value commitments for each other much more explicitly than just about any other process, thereby providing each with clarity and transparency about who the other is. This is so, in particular, because introducing a growing person to the world (i.e., the child) requires that we explain ourselves as people in the most fundamental ways possible, spelling out who we are, what values we are committed to, etc. In that way, the process of raising a child is always also a substantive process of self-explication, thereby providing transparency for the respective romantic partner.

Now, of course, one might object here—once again—that this aimed-at transparency could be accessed through other means. One might, for instance, again think that the practice of co-owning property, such as a family home, could do the same job here. After all: whoever has gone through the process of administrating, furnishing and decorating a home with a romantic partner knows well that these kinds of processes also prompt some explicatory process regarding one’s identity, shared values and understandings (What kind of things do we need? What kind of aesthetic values are we aspiring to? How much of our resources do we want to commit to what?, etc.). Given this, it might then again seem unclear whether parenthood is really the royal road to transparency or whether the mutual clarity could not be achieved through joint ownership of Vermögen.

Again, there is clearly something correct to this worry to which we will have to return. For the moment, though, we might want to dig our heels in with Hegel and say that the process of raising another self-conscious and free being, has incomparable self-explicating value over and above most other things (e.g., mutual ownership of property). Again, the fact that joint care for a child is a reciprocal relationship (‘through whom the parents are loved and whom they love’ (PR: §173), rather than a one-way street, is clearly an important component here: As challenging as it may be to administer, furnish and to decorate a home together, this home does not, for instance, talk back and ask questions in the same way in which a child will (cf. also PR: §174Z). In that way, Hegel thinks, childless marriages are genuinely deprived of an incomparable source of intimate self-explication, which, if present, leads the marital relationship to a greater degree of epistemic objectivity.

This then brings us to the third Hegelian argument—an argument that is built around ‘objectivity’ not in the sense of ‘stability’, nor in the sense of ‘transparency’, but in the most literal sense of ‘taking the form of an external object’. The idea here is this: it is, Hegel thinks, a component of a committed love relationship to give love an ‘external existence (äußerliche Existenz)’ (VPR Hoppe: 168; cf. PR: §173)—i.e., to render the existence of the love relationship metaphysically independent of the existence of the romantic partners linked in it. After all: if partners live together in shared love, they co-create a tenuous social practice (a complex configuration of shared habits, inside jokes, joint memories, etc.) in which they are both invested, and from which they both benefit. Yet, in this process of co-creation, they also incur a commitment to preserve this valued social practice, such that it and its benefits can survive the (momentary or even permanent) absence of one of its founding partners. Put in other words: they incur a commitment to ground this valued social practice in something else than just their continued active co-existence with one another, thereby lending it a higher degree of metaphysical existence (namely ‘existence for itself’ (PR: §173)).

What gives this constitutive aim of a committed relationship its particular urgency is what one might call the problem of separation: the problem that love requires a degree of unification between the partners that stands in inextricable tension with the fact that they remain physically separate people that cannot literally be together all the time. This is trivially true already in daily life, where marital partners will have different routines and spheres of life (the home and the office, etc.), but it is—of course—even more true existentially, since it is unlikely that both partners will die at the same time. Death, in an ultimate way, makes clear that partners, if they are invested in the value of the shared social practice they created—if they believe in the life that they made together—they have to lend this life some metaphysical independence: if only such that the surviving partner can continue to enjoy it and its benefits.

Yet, how could such metaphysical independence ever be achieved? The Hegelian answer, of course, is that it can be achieved through having and raising children together. The premise for this thought is that the love relationship—understood as a social practice—will come to shape a child in important ways (PR: §173, §174). Indeed, Hegel thinks that a child will come to reflect the love relationship of its parents in a variety of dimensions: taking over, e.g., the same forms of affirmations, having similar memories, following the same kind of routines and sharing in (some) of the same inside jokes. It is in this sense that a child can count, as Hegel’s text subtly says, not just as a causal result of the love relationship between the two parents, but rather as a manifestation of that underlying love relationship: parents, Hegel writes, do not just love their child ‘as a result of their love’, but ‘as their love (als ihre Liebe)’ (PR: §173, my emphasis).Footnote ¹⁴

But if that is plausible then there is a good sense to the idea that the love between the two original partners has ‘taken on an external existence’ in a new person: no longer confined to the active co-presence of the two original members, their relationship has taken on a new life in the child. As a result, in interacting with this new person, their parents will—in a rather concrete way—experience some of the relationship they have with their romantic partner, as the relationship is reflected in the behaviours of the child—or, as Hegel puts it: ‘In the child, the mother loves her husband, and he loves her’ (PR: §173Z), since it is in the child that both of them have ‘a counter-image of their love’ (VPR Hoppe: 168).

We may concretely imagine, for instance, a romantic partner recognizing certain idioms of her husband used by the child, or we may imagine a romantic partner sharing with his child an inside joke that was originally developed in a spontaneous exchange with their partner. In those kinds of cases, it seems possible for one of the partners to experience the relationship even in the absence of their partner, as it seems to have taken on a life of its own in the life of another person. By contrast, childless marriage, at least on Hegel’s view, does not enjoy this level of external existence. In a childless marriage, the love between the two partners retains a much greater degree of dependence on the two partners being actually with one another—and with it, a greater vulnerability to the problem of separation in its quotidian and existential formations.

We can thus summarize the three arguments canvassed here. Hegel thinks that having and raising children lends ‘objectivity’ to a marital relationship in three distinct ways. Having and raising children gives the relationship the stability it demands (practical objectivity), the transparency it demands (epistemic objectivity) and the external existence it demands (metaphysical objectivity). Thus, and against this background, Hegel thinks that it is only by having and raising children that a marital relationship comes to be fully complete.Footnote ¹⁵

III. The grain of truth in Hegel’s argument

With all of this on the table, we can turn from a more neutral description of Hegel’s view of childless marriage to a more critical examination of it. As I have already indicated above, I think that important parts of Hegel’s argument do not hold up to closer scrutiny, but that Hegel’s argument nevertheless contains an important grain of truth—a grain of truth that, indeed, still has relevance for our contemporary discussion. Let me elaborate and make a case for this claim by focusing on four points.

The first point is this: Hegel’s argument about childless marriage clearly is framed in a way that artificially constrains its own argumentative dynamics, framing his conclusions in a far more exclusionary way than really necessary. For one, there is nothing—in principle—that necessitates this argument being about marriage narrowly conceived (rather than about ‘committed love relationships’ in general). After all: Explicitly and by Hegel’s own words, his argument for the incompleteness of childless marriage turns on the constitution of a committed ‘relationship of love (Verhältnis der Liebe)’ (PR: §173Z, cf. §173) between the two partners, and not on the fact that this relationship of love has taken on the legal and institutionalized form of a marriage. And indeed: we can easily see that the practical, epistemic and metaphysical benefits of having children, if they apply at all, all apply equally well to committed love relationships of any type,Footnote ¹⁶ even if they have not entered, or will not enter, the institutional status of a marriage.

Now, of course, Hegel frames his argument in this particular way because he takes himself to have significant arguments—developed, in particular, in his critique of Schlegel and the Romantics—to the effect that all committed love relationships should take the form of marriage (PR: §164, §164Z). Taking himself to have established this and to have foreclosed the legitimate possibility for long-term committed love relationships outside of legal marriage, it then makes sense to him to phrase his argument about children as one about marital relationships specifically (as he does in PR: §173, §173Z). But this does not change the fact that the argument about children itself only draws on the ‘relationship of love’ (PR: §173) as its argumentative ground, and that, therefore, by the lights of this argument, we have no reasons to restrict his conclusion to marital love relationships only.

The second point picks up on a similar dynamics, for Hegel’s argument seems to be not only artificially constrained in its focus on marital relationships only, but also in its focus on children. This is an especially important point, since it picks up some of the objections to Hegel’s argument that we have already mentioned above. As we saw there, Hegel indeed has persuasive arguments why, for instance, joint ownership of property (Familienvermögen, PR: §§170–72) cannot ‘stand in’ for the dynamics of having children: co-owning a family home, for instance, might have some practical and epistemic benefits for the unity of a couple, but it is clear that these benefits are limited and more short-term than the care for another rational subject. Houses, for instance, cannot become participants in the practice of a love relationship in the way that children can, thereby limiting the ways in which they can metaphysically externalize the love relationship in Hegel’s sense.

However, it seems clear that—while property might indeed not be an appropriate ‘stand in’ for having and raising children—the care for any other rational subject may well be. Indeed, there is no principled reason to think that, if a couple chooses to collectively take responsibility, e.g., for a neighbour or for a parent, this would not engender a functionally similar dynamic to the one that Hegel points out with regard to childrearing. An academic couple, for instance, that invests itself into joint care for doctoral students might very well develop a relationship to those students that is similarly committal, and involves a similar degree of reciprocity, exchange and mutual responsibility than is involved in a proper relationship of child-care: thereby conveying objectivity on their romantic relationship, even though the subjects of care are neither children, nor related to the parents in a strict biological or legal sense.

Indeed, we might even wonder whether joint care for a collective subject (such as a social or political movement) might function similarly here as well. After all: bringing into being a movement of rational subjects—being committed to their care, answering questions by new members, and externalizing one’s relationship in the habits, practices and self-understandings of the new group—might very well stand in functional equivalence to relationships of child-care proper, conveying the same kind of objectivity on romantic relationships engaged in these activities. (Now, whether they really do, of course, is an empirical question that might vary from case to case. The crucial philosophical point here is just this: there is no principled reason to frame the Hegelian argument as being about child-care narrowly conceived, when it seems that other relationships to rational subjects can function equivalently in conveying ‘objectivity’ on the love relationship of a couple).

Now, again and certainly, it deserves to be said that, of course, Hegel’s framing here is not entirely arbitrary. In the Philosophy of Right, after all, Hegel had presented some arguments as to why a nuclear family structure (consisting of parents and biological or adopted children only) is a superior unit of care compared to, e.g., more intergenerational units of care, which Hegel associates with a more tribal, and less modern, age (PR: §172). Against this background, then, it makes sense for Hegel to frame his argument about joint projects of care as an argument specifically about the relationship between the married couple and their children, rather than, e.g., about shared responsibilities of care for, for instance, another member or members of their wider social world. But this does not change the fact that Hegel’s argument about childless marriage does not strictly require the kind of care involved to be literal childcare, and that therefore, by the lights of this argument, there is no reason to artificially restrict the dynamics of the argument to the relationship between parents and children specifically.

In that way, and this is an important intermediate result to note, Hegel’s argument about childless marriage, read with a critical eye, does not really have to be about ‘marriage’ and about ‘children’ specifically (even though for Hegel himself it clearly is). Rather, and this is point three to attend to here, restated with this overly exclusionary framing removed, the view could be seen as thus: what Hegel really is arguing for here, underneath his own artificially narrow framing, is an intrinsic social requirement of romantic love. Within a romantic relationship, Hegel argues, caring properly for one another seems to involve that we jointly care for someone else as well. This is because this externally directed care completes the underlying romantic relationship, stabilizing it, clarifying it and lifting it to a new level of existence. While a committed love relationship, at least initially, seems to revolve around an ‘I’ and a ‘You’, Hegel points out an intrinsic dimension as to why it should broaden itself towards a genuine ‘We’—and why romantic couples fall short, if they remain within the bidirectional level only.

Another way of stating this (and we alluded to this already earlier) is that Hegel, thus interpreted, goes up against a common intuition about romantic love: an intuition on which romantic love is deeply private and requires that we draw our circle of care tightly around solely our partner (have ‘only eyes for them’). But Hegel thinks that this view gets things precisely backwards: not only is a romantic relationship compatible with care for somebody else, but it, in fact, requires externally directed care. In that way, a romantic relationship cannot be an entirely private affair that only exists between you and me, but also requires a caring engagement with the wider social world.

Thus restated, I would argue, Hegel’s view has much to recommend itself. Retracing the argumentative steps we have taken already above, it seems insightful to say that the very commitment to a love relationship constitutively requires that we render this love relationship stable against our own momentary volitions, that we lastingly clarify to our partner who we are, and, perhaps most importantly, that we give our relationship an existence independent of our own. And it seems equally insightful that these intrinsic goods of a committed love relationship can only become fully realized if we take up a joint project of care for someone other than ourselves. For only shared projects of care for another person are, at once, ethically committal enough to be stabilizing in the relevant sense, epistemically challenging enough to be clarifying in the relevant sense, and metaphysically substantial enough to allow the romantic relationship to gain an existential foothold in the world.

It deserves to be said that removing Hegel’s view from its narrow marriage- and child-focused framing (in the way that I have just suggested) gives it a specifically broad applicability: its scope now includes various committed love relationships—including, of course, same-sex relationships, etc.Footnote ¹⁷—and its fulfilment conditions now includes various forms of shared care, including shared care for, e.g., collective subjects. In that way, Hegel’s view, reduced to its kernel of truth, seems broadly applicable in a world where various (and not necessarily marital) forms of love relationship abound, challenging its participants to seek out joint projects of care together, whatever intergenerational (e.g., parents, children, nephews), intersubjective (e.g., family friends, neighbours) or, perhaps most interestingly, collective (e.g., political causes and movements) form they may take—for it is through these kinds of joint projects that couples can complete their own romantic relationship to one another.

But, of course, and this is point four, we need to consider at least one important objection. Most immediately, after all, one might be tempted to respond to the argument I laid out here by saying that joint projects of care can clearly also pose obstacles to committed relationships, and that these obstacles have, so far, not been properly considered. After all: it seems highly plausible that caring for another person drains psychological and emotional resources, and that this, in fact, can challenge the stability and epistemic transparency of a love relationship. Tired from caring for a child, for instance, parents might have less, and in fact not more, patience with one another and less patience for clarifying their shared values—thereby destabilizing the relationship and hampering the self-transparency that partners aim at as a constitutive commitment of their relationship towards one another.

This objection, of course, has some plausibility to it, but it does not cut against the Hegelian argument in the way that the objector imagines. The Hegelian argument, after all, was that there are, in principle, unique benefits to jointly caring for another person and that those benefits are needed to realize the intrinsic demands of a committed love relationship. The fact that these benefits do not always materialize in practice and that they can, on occasion, be outweighed by other elements of these projects does not lessen the principled reason to engage in these projects in the first place.

In this regard, Hegel’s argument for the incompleteness of childless marriage—even if stripped down to its rational core—runs in perfect parallel to his argument (PR: §163) that a romantic relationship is a source of a unique type of romantic and sexual recognition (not available anywhere else). The fact that, in practice, some romantic relationships fail to materialize this unique potential—and indeed leave their participants wanting for actual recognition—does not cut against this view. Just as with Hegel’s view about the benefits of jointly caring for another person, it simply shows that human relationships—of love or of care—do not always live up to what they can, and perhaps should, be.