She is at Home: Re-situating women as embodied agency in Aristotle’s and Hegel’s political philosophy of fulfilment
Date
2020-08-26
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Abstract
In this thesis I seek to recover hidden resources from Aristotle and Hegel that allow us to think through the possibilities of embodied agency and human fulfilment. The puzzle begins with an observation that the possibilities of fulfilment seem to require an impossible trade-off for women: to be either the material self as embodied or the metaphysical self as mind, but never both. In this analysis my concern is directed towards problems related to embodied differences along the lines of sex and gender and how these differences at once create unique opportunities for fulfilment and simultaneously have been used as justification for systematic oppression of women. I attempt to bring the body and mind closer together through Aristotle’s account of the psyche, here demonstrating that the body provides the mind with distinctly embodied experiences that direct the possibilities for self-constitution and inner virtue. Motherhood emerges as one such possibilities, which I argue finds a new home in Aristotle’s philosophy as a complete virtue and unique friendship in the social world, which is ultimately unrecognized. I subsequently trace the development of women, the body, and the will, throughout Hegel’s development of social worlds in order to reveal both the possibilities for fulfilment within these worlds and how these worlds failed to account for the fullness of human life. Here, I argue that Hegel’s account of marriage provides key resources for including embodied difference and subjectivity within a system of freedom, but that he ultimately fails to establish a stable and genuinely free social world for women based on his own standard of freedom. Gathering up the principles retrieved from both Aristotle and Hegel, I briefly turn to a model of embodied agency that could provide genuine possibilities for fulfillment of body and mind.
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Keywords
women, embodiment, agency, self-constitution, subjectivity, motherhood, marriage
Citation
Gordon, K. M. (2020). She is at Home: Re-situating women as embodied agency in Aristotle’s and Hegel’s political philosophy of fulfilment (Master's thesis, University of Calgary, Calgary, Canada). Retrieved from https://prism.ucalgary.ca.