Love and law: Hegel's critique of morality

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

In speaking of punishment as fate, Hegel contends that transgressive actions are consequential for our ongoing experience of ourselves in relation to others. Fate stands for a logic of action and reaction, the coming-to-be of the experience of life as hostile and an enemy. Fate signals the return of repressed life. In classical tragedy, the avenging fates return in the form of an extended logic of unintended actions having the consequence of, literally, bringing down the life of their perpetrator; in modern tragedy, it is the experience of guilt and suffering by the evildoer that represents the return of dirempted life--my guilty conscience just the ghost of the other haunting me. For the purpose of exemplification, assume that the notion of united life is represented by the notion of a general condition of trust between me and my others. Assume further, pace Hobbes, that the condition of general trust cannot intelligibly be a consequence of the knowledge of each that every other knows that the consequence of trespass will be punishment; this is implausible because, first, such knowledge is not trust but merely a calculation by each of every other's calculation of the likelihood of detection; and second, external threat of detection and punishment does not reach far enough into the fine-grained detail of everyday life in which the necessity of trust is operative. General trust by each of all its others is one aspect of united life, its friendliness. Transgressive actions come to matter to the continuing experience of my relation to others: if I have destroyed the grounds of trust between me and my others because I know that I cannot be trusted, how might I trust them? If trusting them is impossible, then my every action will be riddled with anxiety since there is nothing I can count on. Anxiety here is just guilt deferred. On this account, the experience of guilt is not a consequence of law breaking, but rather of disrupting the conditions of my active life with others. Hegel, then, must be assuming that guilt and conscience are not, or at least not only or not best understood as artifacts of a repressive psychology of an internalized, punishing superego, but rather the actual coming to awareness of how my life of action is internally bound to the life of others, and how my transgressive action has severed those conditions of possible action.

Anxiety and guilt are my experience of being caught within the toils of fate. While fate appears as simply a direct consequence of another's deed, this is not quite so. Trespass is an occasion of fate, not its hydraulic cause; what really produces fate, Hegel claims, "is the manner of receiving and reacting against the other's deed" (233). Fate is not a mechanical consequence of trespass; that is merely the external perception of it, the one bequeathed by Greek tragedy; rather fate is my awareness and response to what has been done, it is a form of reaction and response in which I come to awareness of my answerability for my doings, and thus a further elaboration of the deed itself. Putting the matter this way is equally to say that guilt as fate is both a component in and my awareness of the quality and nature of my relationship with others. Hegel continues: "The fate in which the man senses what he has lost creates a longing for lost life. This longing ... recognizes what has been lost as life, as what was once its friend, and this recognition is already an enjoyment of life" (231). Suffering guilt is my acknowledgement of my answerability for what I have done; because with guilt I locate myself within life, as lost and desired, my acknowledgement of answerability is simultaneously my acceptance of life as the condition of my action, hence "an enjoyment of life." In brief, each moment in this unfolding of my trespass reveals itself to be but a modification of life and nothing more.