Love and law: Hegel's critique of morality

Social Research, Summer, 2003 by J.M. Bernstein

THE Spirit of Christianity and its Fate" (hereafter "Spirit") provides the most direct and eloquent presentation of the logical structure and moral content of Hegel's ethical vision. This is a vision of ethical life itself, of how Hegel conceives of the meaning of ethics, what it is about and its internal dynamic logic, and of ethicality so understood as constitutive of our relation to ourselves, others, and the natural world. In working out the substance of ethical living, above all in opposition to Kant's morality of universal law, Hegel is simultaneously elaborating the structural contours of human experience. Hegelian idealism is constituted by this identification of the normative logic of ethical life with the structure of experience in general. Hegel's ethical vision is hence the vision of the demands and fatalities of ethical life becoming the pivot and underlying logic for the philosophical comprehension of human experience uberhaupt. It is only slightly hyperbolic to say that in the "Spirit" essay Hegel is interrogating and proposing the possibility of ethics as first philosophy, where the idea of ethics as first philosophy provides the governing impulse and ultimate meaning of Hegelian objective (absolute) idealism. If this is right, what Hegel has to say about subjects such as knowledge, reason, and objectivity must be keyed to the dynamics of ethical life. (1)

The great advantage of beginning with this essay is that it presents Hegel's vision in an undiluted form: its expresses most fully what Hegel will want to say about ethicality and the constitutive structures of experience consequent upon that ethicality. There is about the vision, or so I shall argue, something ethically deep and compelling; the compellingness of this original vision, the thought that it captures something about why ethical life matters, about how and why we have ethical concerns at all, about how the achievements and fatalities of ethical experience can appear as what matters most in a life, provides the motivation for Hegel's attempts, above all in the Phenomenology of Spirit, to secure it against the inadequacies of its articulation in the "Spirit" essay. At the center of Hegel's ethical vision in the "Spirit" essay is the idea of a causality of fate, an ethical logic of action and reaction: to act against another person is to destroy my own life, to call down upon myself revenging fates; I cannot (ethically) harm another without (ethically) harming myself. In this way the flourishing and foundering of each is intimately bound up with the flourishing and foundering of all. Social space is always constituted ethically, as a space in which subjects are necessarily formed or deformed, freed or oppressed through the structures of interaction governing everyday life. It is this that is Hegel's great idea since it reveals how ethical life matters independent of any particular moral norms, laws, ideals, principles, or ends. Ethical life is not, in the first instance, about moral principles, but about the ways in which both particular actions and whole forms of action injure, wound, and deform recipient and actor alike; it is about the secret bonds connecting our weal and woe to the lives of all those around us.

In the essay, ethical life as constituted by a causality of fate is logically and historically unfolded in relation to an inadequate holistic metaphysics of love and life. In putting the matter this way, I have two thoughts in mind. First, the metaphysics of the "Spirit" essay is emphatically a metaphysics of life and love--life and love are Hegel's first idea about the nature of the secret bonds connecting us together--and hence anti-theological. Christian God-talk in the essay is Hegel's means for expressing the metaphysics of life and love, and so of revealing that such God-talk has its ultimate substance solely in ethical life. Hegel's model here is, of course, Kant's Religion within the Limits of Reason Alone. Hegel thinks there is an ethical content embedded in the emergence of Christianity, above all in the Jesus narrative, that Kant misses and misrepresents altogether; so fully does Kant mistake the fundamental ethical logic of Christianity that his doctrine is not Christian at all, but rather a rationalized version of the very Judaism biblical Christianity aimed to supplant. Hegel's method is nonetheless akin to Kant's, with a twist: his ambition is not to interpret Christianity in the light of an already secured moral theory, as Kant did, but rather to make manifest the ethical logic, the ethical content of the logic of experience, implicit in early Christianity. Hegel's hermeneutical practice can be baffling and misleading because he perceives Jesus as doing practically the same activity of attempting to unlock the ethical content of theological discourse that he is doing theoretically; for Hegel, Jesus too is engaged in an anti-theological enterprise of ethical decoding, and thus Jesus too is using God-talk as a fumbling, indeterminate linguistic way of expressing what is a holistic ethical vision. The hubris of Hegel's identification of his endeavor with Jesus' has not gone unnoticed (see Hamacher, 1998); however, once one recognizes that Hegel takes Jesus to be an hermeneutician and performative decoder, a kind of philosopher, then that hubris can be somewhat softened. Still, the model for Hegel's essay is Kant's religion book; in this light we might retitle Hegel's essay: "Religion within the Limits of Life Alone." So suggesting requires one further acknowledgement: while Kant's philosophy contains a moment of religious or theological excess, Hegel's does not. (2) Because he thinks the ethical content is, however indeterminately, available from the outset, then for him there is no excess or remainder. This too can lead to confusion since Hegel does not construe his interpretive effort as reducing religion to ethicality or reinterpreting religious thought in terms of secular notions and ideals; rather, his aim, like that of Jesus, is to explicate what God is, to make manifest the implicit content of the concept of God.