ABSTRACT
This chapter teases out one thread in Hegel's metaphysics of marriage, what the author calling a teleological attempt to bind marriage to freedom. Here, he shows how this thread ends up adopting an atavistic Aristotelian naturalism. The author moves to the second of Hegel's metaphysical threads, what the he call his ontological account. The author shows how it radically de-natures and overturns the teleological ground of marriage as an ethical act. Yet, in this confrontation between teleology and ontology, he encounters not a metaphysical solution to the ethics of marriage, but a deep puzzle: How to secure the promise not of marriage alone or ethicality alone, but marriage as an ethical act of freedom? The author develops this solution through a recovery of an idea of the perfection of marital freedom in, and through, sexual embodiment. This new, Hegelian metaphysics of marriage gives us marriage that is neither naturalistic and ethically immature nor dispositional and empty.
