Hegel on Childless Marriage

Abstract

At the beginning of his discussion of childhood and childrearing, Hegel confronts the reader with a provocative view: marriage without children, Hegel argues, is incomplete ( PR : §173, §173Z). It is tempting to disregard this view as yet another old-fashioned thing that Hegel has to say about marriage—yet another example, that is, of one of Hegel’s nineteenth-century convictions that are better left in the past. But in this paper, I want to make the case that Hegel’s view for the incompleteness of childless marriage, despite many shortcomings, contains a grain of truth. This grain of truth consists in the thought that a committed love relationship comes with a general social requirement : to truly care about one another as a couple, we also have to jointly care about somebody else. In that way, romantic love—contrary to appearances—has to always include a social ‘We’.