Love and law: Hegel's critique of morality

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

Second, because nothing can count against the authority of God, then the fact of God, his being, his being one, his being the source of meaning, is not a truth apprehended but "a command" (196), a categorical imperative, an infinite demand. In making command prior to truth, one places it beyond the realm of evidence and so rational criticism. It is the combination of the radical separation of nature and ideality, on the one hand, and the command structure of self-subjection on the other that turns sentimental life into pathology. For Hegel the emblematic episode in which this structure is realized is the near sacrifice of Isaac. In this episode we find the paradigmatic playing out of the contest between love and law; it is, of course, equally, the source of Hegel's contention that the structure of Judaic lawfulness involves, essentially, the severing of the bonds of love. For Hegel it matters terribly that this is the one moment in the Abrabamic narrative in which he is troubled, anxious, doubtful, in which his "all-exclusive heart" (187) could be caused disquiet and depression. Abraham's hesitation is the marker that "love alone was beyond his power"; Abraham naturally perceived in the person of Isaac all his hopes for the future, his hopes for posterity and the one kind of immortality he might have. But this is as much to say that love is the counterclaim to the authority of God. For that authority, however, nothing mundane can count--the very thought Kierkegaard states as the "teleological suspension of the ethical." For Hegel, the teleological suspension of the ethical is the truth of the positing of God; so Abraham can truly accept the authority of God only once he is willing to make the sacrifice of his love. This makes sacrifice the type of relation between the claims of mundane particulars against God; practically, subsumption of the material world to the authority of God is, precisely, the sacrifice of the particular to the universal; sacrifice is how the bonds of love and life are severed. Abraham achieves peace in accepting the necessity of sacrifice: "and his heart was quieted only through the certainty of the feeling that this love was not so strong as to render him unable to slay his beloved son with his own hand." The surest evidence of faith is a quiet self-assurance in the act of murder--and the more one loves the person to be murdered, the more certain is the faith. Of course, God stays Abraham's hand; Isaac lives. So Abraham and Isaac are still father and son, only now their relation is mediated through God's command. Since the meaning of that mediation is nothing but the sacrifice Abraham was willing to make, then logically and motivationally the sacrifice was committed: from henceforth the father is always the law of death and the son forever dead (188).

If this all sounds like implausible materials for nation building, one should recall their origin with Noah. This entire elaborate mediation of relations between selves, and between the Jewish nation and all other nations ("the horrible claim that He alone was God and that this nation was the only one to have a god" (188)), is motivated by fear of threatening nature, and the need to master it. The desire for mastery becomes the desire for radical autonomy, where the desire for autonomy is potentially satisfied by the subsumption and sacrifice of the claim of each and every natural thing to the authority of transcendent being. It is the complex of those fears and desires that are embodied in the continual work of serf-subjection, and it is hence further those same passions that keep the work of serf-subjection actual. Radical fear and the corresponding desire for mastery, and the channeling of those into the desire for freedom and independence, make plausible the attraction of such a form of life, even its inevitability.