Woman’s and Man’s Nature according to Hegel
Human and divine law is interdependent in Hegel's scheme, but the former is clearly superior in being more universal. Woman, according to Hegel, is limited to the dialectically inferior realm of the family, while man, through his participation in the polis, "leaves this immediate, elemental, and therefore, strictly speaking, negative ethical life of the Family, in order to acquire and produce the ethical life that is conscious of itself and actual."

The tragedy of the Greek world, according to Hegel, is the inevi opposition of human and divine law. The realms, although interdependent, are also in tension, woman representing the law of the family, man the law of the state. Antigone's decision to bury Polyneices arises out of her familial duty to bury and honor her dead brother. Creon's decree that the traitor Polyneices be denied a burial represents the law of the state. Thus human law and divine law are set in opposition. According to Hegel, the tragedy represented in the Antigone results from the fact that the unmediated opposition of these two realms leads to the inescapable destruction of the pagan world. Woman, concerned with the law of the family, is seen by Hegel as being the catalyst of this destruction.

Since the community only gets an existence through its interference with the happiness of the Family, and by dissolving [individual] self-consciousness into the universal, it creates for itself in what it suppresses and what is at the same time essential to it an internal enemy--womankind in general. Educated written term paper are always online to help you with essay writing; original services! Womankind--the everlasting irony [in the life] of the community--changes by intrigue the universal end of the government into a private end. Hegel does not, in the Phenomenology, explain why woman is destined to be the irony of the community, that is, why she embodies the law of the divine, the law of the family, while man manifests the superior human law. To find the answer, we must look at Hegel's later writings, in particular his Philosophy of Right and his Encyclopaedia of the Philosophical Sciences. Hegel justifies his exclusion of women from the state through recourse to very traditional-sounding arguments concerning biological differences between the sexes.