Love and law: Hegel's critique of morality

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

Second, the holistic metaphysics of life espoused in the "Spirit" essay is inadequate, but not completely false. Taking his cue from Aristotle (and Holderlin and Schelling), Hegel wants to construe practical, ethical life as somehow continuous with organic, biological life, with the living world; having a life--as in the expression "get a life!"--is a formation of living, of being alive. This account of ethical experience thence requires both the holistic assumptions operative in speaking about organic living things, above all the normative exigencies that follow upon an organic conception of the logic of part and whole, and, the vitalistic conceptuality of life and death, of injury, hurt, and wounding that life discourse so understood carries with it. The depth of Hegel's ethical vision depends on the appropriation of life discourse in these two registers for ethical experience--practical life as a form of living. The inadequacy of his account derives from the immediacy of the appropriation; organism/life discourse is adopted but not philosophically earned. Nonetheless, as we shall see, Hegel's deployment of life in "Spirit" has profound consonances with Nietzsche's critique of morality. More important, the ethical depth the metaphysics of life provides to Hegel's account of ethical experience sets the agenda for what he means to resource through the notions of recognition and spirit in the Phenomenology. The fundamental task of the Phenomenology on this interpretation is to make good the inadequacies in the original holistic metaphysics of life in the "Spirit" essay while sustaining the same fundamental ethical logic. The Phenomenology conceptually actualizes, through the notions of recognition and spirit, the ethical vision first displayed in "The Spirit of Christianity and its Fate." (3) Hence, the logic of ethical life displayed in the "Spirit" essay remains, the metaphysics supporting it changes.

I. The Spirit of Judaism: Notes for a Genealogy of Transcendental Idealism

Hegel interprets biblical Judaism as the coming-to-be of transcendental idealism as a form of life, or, what is the same, he interprets Judaism as the genealogical origin of Western reason in its fundamental Platonic and Kantian dispensation. (4) Hence, although Hegel regards Abraham as the "true progenitor of the Jews" (182), (5) it matters to the overall ambition of his project that he begins with story of the flood, and with a contrast between Noah and Nimrod, and between them and Deucalion and Pyrrha. (6) The state of nature, that time when man and nature still lived in a state of harmony, comes to end with the flood; its "destructive, invincible, irresistible hostility ... [and] manslaughter" reveal the indifference of physical nature to human ends, leading to the necessity for control and mastery. Western rationality emerges in response to the need to master threatening nature; it is the contours of this nature-mastering reason that will come to structure Judaic life. But this is equally to say that the deforming and perverse quality of Jewish life, and hence of Kantian reason, derives from the fact that it appropriates a form of rationality designed to master hostile nature, and applies it to the human subject, its self-relation, and its relations with its human, as well as nonhuman, others. (7) The logic of mastery over nature, the logic of first separation and then domination that Hegel perceives as the debilitating and self-destructive feature of Kantian rationalism has its intelligible source in the first human responses to the appearance of nature as itself coldly indifferent and brutally antagonistic to human life. Judaic reason is an instrumental rationality generated as a means to human survival turned into an integral form of life. (8)