De Antígona a la mujer correcta. La imagen de la mujer según Hegel en la tensión entre la Fenomenología del espíritu y la Filosofía del derecho de 1820

Abstract

The ‘proper’ woman is the main figure in Hegel’s mature thought. Indeed, this figure never interested him as much as Antigone. However, he still degraded Antigone: he infringed the singularity of the greatness of Antigone’s character in the Phenomenology, mixed his image of Antigone with modern bourgeois features, and thereby transferred some characteristics of her singularity to the image of the woman in the context of the nu- clear family in the emerging bourgeois society. This fused image of Antigone’s greatness damages her, and also does not facilitate a proper interpretation and self-interpretation of women, or rather to the clarification of their social and gender roles in the emerging modern society. Strictly deviating from this mixed picture, Hegel’s Philosophy of Right has offered a comprehensible, and in many ways still relevant picture of the differentiated so- cial and gender roles appropriate to the expectations of the emerging modern society, or of a corresponding self-interpretation and self-determination for women in emerging Mo- dernity. A subjective-normative orientation in the practical attitude is likewise something women share with men: a woman must appropriate and exercise her social and gender roles properly. But all these expectations fall far short of Antigone’s greatness. Through his in- sight into the fragility of human existence in the modern age, Hegel opened up a perspec- tive in which women and men repeatedly interrogate the meaning of our own existence.