8/11/2019 Knox -Hegel's Attitude to Kant's (Kant.1958.49.1-4.70)
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HEGEL S
ATTITDE
TO
KANT S
ETHICS
by T. M.Knox, St. Andrews
In
bis
L ectures on theHistory of Philosophy
1
), Hegel described
himself
s a
Lutheran? with
no
less justice
he
might
have
claimed
to b e
f
in
ethics
2
),
a
Kantian. It
is t rue
that
bis orthodoxy may be suspect in
theology and ethics
alike,
and
there
may now seem to be an air of paradox
about the
assertion
that Hegel was essentially a K ant ian in
ethics.
Never-
theless,
this
is the paradox which I propose to defend.
The Charge that Hegel had no ethics was made against him in
bis
own
lifetime (W.XVIII.XX) and has often been repeated. What he
published
on
the topics
whidi
Kant discussed at length in
bis ethical
works is small in
bulk, but the fundamental reason for this seems to me to be that he was
substantially in agreement with Kant and had nothing new to say on the
subject. The
general
impression that Hegel was not a Kant ian in ethics
arises
from
concentrating to o much attention on bis commoner criticisms
of Kant and too little on their context and
drift.
He Tisually indicates that
bis criticisms are secondary
by
going
out of
bis
way to pay a
t r ibute
to
K ant s u nd yin g m erit in ethics
3
).
The criticisms
often
do not
affect
the
substance of Kant s doctrine, b ut only details, and more frequently still
the
object
of
Hegel s attack
is the insufficiency of
morality
s such, not
of
K ant s view
of m orality, or the
contradictions
in
m oral experience itself,
not in K ant s Interpretation of it. Hegel s quarrel with Kant was not that
Kant
was mistaken about niprality but that he did not clearly Supplement
bis
teaching with
a
doctrine
of Sittlichkeit.
This general thesis I propose to
argue
by considering (a)Hegel s clear
devotion to Kant in bis
early
writings and the ground of bis revolt against
bim,
(b )
those
passages in Hegel which might b e adduced against m e,
namely bis
chief
published criticisms
of K ant s ethics, and (c) his
concep-
tion of Sittlichkeit which in substance is not so far removed from K ant s
way of thinking
s
is sometimes supposed.
Werke
XIII.
89. I quote, from
Glockner s edition,
the volume and
page
of the original edition.
~
,
2
) I use the word
in
its ordinary English
sense.
Where I have
occasion
to
allude
to Hegel s own
distinction
between Moralitt and Sittlichkeit l use the
German words.
3
) Hegel deplored
the
neglect
of
Kant
by his contemporaries (W.
XVII. 238.
cf,
III. 52). He
never
minimised his own debt to Kant s
philosophy: was
brought up on it (Letter to Duboc, 30 July 1822).
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With the exception of Th. L.Haering, to
whose
monumental work all
students of Hegel are indebted, readers ofHegel's
Theologische
Jugend-
Schriften
have
found
in the
papers written
at
Berne
the dominating
in-
fluence of
Kant. Hegel
had studied the
three Critiques
at
Tbingen
and he
resumedtheirstudy
at
Berne
in 1794,but his main
interest
until
1800
was
concentrated on religion and
theology,
history and politics; and
although
it was
Kant
who stimulated him to
write iii Berne,
the Stimulus
came
not
from the Critiquesbut from the essay on
Religion
within the
Sounds
of
>Reason alone
Hegel's
writings
in
17956
4
),
are
inspired
almost
entirely
iby
this
essay.
Religion,
Kant
maintained, is, on its
subjective
side, the
knowledge
of
all our duties
s
divine
commands
(Pt. IV.
l,
ad
iniL).
Revealed religion
would hold
that
ourduties are
dutiesbecause they
are divinely
command-
ed,
but a
natural
or rational religion recognises that duty is the law of
man's
own reason, sothatman does not need to have it revealed to him
or
to be
provided with
any
motive
fo r
observing
the
mora l
law
over
and
iabove
reverence fo r
the law
itself.
A
rational
religion,
while
not
required
for morality,mayneverthelessbe implied by it and be an aid to it by the
strengthening of our moral
motives through
the idea of God s amoral
lawgiver. Kant proceeds to consider what religious beliefs
oan
be
justified
by reason unaidedand tocarry on apolemic against allattemptstobase
faith on a
special revelation,
on
historical
facts
or on miracles,s
well
s
against the tyranny
of
priests
and the
fetishism
of
religious
observances,
s if any acts could be pleasing to God
except
the fulfilment ofmoral
duties The Christian religion should be purified of dross by rational
criticism,andKant goeson toshowhowsomeof itsleading doctrines
can
be reinterpreted
s
rational instead of s given
or
positive or statutory.
In particular,
"Christianityhas
the great advantage over
Judaism
of being
presented to us s issuing
from
the
mouth
of its
first teacher s
a moral
religion, and hence, being thus intimately associated with reason, could
be disseminated to all ages and all pupils by reason alone, without any
historical learning
Pt.
IV.
1.
I. ad.
fin.).
Hegel accepts
all this. The fragment
printed
in Nohl pp. 6071 fre-
quently eciioes Kant's phraseology and repeats his illustrations. The
im -
portant point is that
Kant's
essay on Religion
1792)
presupposes the
ethical
doctrine expounded in the Critiqueo f Practical Reason 1788), and
Hegel is
following
Kant in both religion and ethics.
Kant
had suggested
thatan attempt to harmonise the
teadiing
ofJesuswith the
holiestteaching
of
reason
was not
only
a
possibility
but
bounden duty (Pt.
II.
2),
and
Hegel set
himself
to
this
task by
writing
a life ofJesus, exhibiting him
s
a
human moral teacher proclaiming
a
doctrine wholly
in accordance
with Kant's ethics. Presumably sudi a document mightbe regarded s
contributing to the moral education of
mankind
by being the scriptures
of
a new rational religion. In any event,Hegel
took
painswithhis task,
4
) Theologische Jugendschffen Nohl)
f
pp. 60213,
71
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though
the
result
of
discharging
the
duty laid
on him by his
master may
eventually havehelped to convince himthat
there
was somethingwrong
with the enterprise.
In a similar spirit ofdiscipleship he wrotehis
essay
on the Positivity
the
Christian
Religion,in order to answer the question: Granted that,
s Kant averred, the teaching of Jesus was in
conformity
with pure
reason, how is it that the teaching of orthodox Christianity has become
so authoritative and
positive ?
In
both oftheseessaysthe problem is Kantian: their
background
is the
Kantian distinction between the positive law of legality and the natural
or
rational law of
morality:
and their spirit is Kantian,s isshown espe-
cially by the conclusion of the
second
essay (Nohl, 2112) where the
Christian
religion s taught by the Churdi is said to
afford objective
motives whichare not the lawitself,i. e. ispositive and notrational.Both
essays rest
on
Kantian doctrine about
religion,
about
the
teaching
of
Jesus, and
about morality, but
the
significant thing
for
Hegel's develop-
ment is that the essays subject this doctrine to the
test
of history. Kant
had not
taken history seriously enough,
and in ef fec t he
admitted
s
much
when he said that a moral use may be
made
of anhistoricalstatement in
Scripture without considering what the author's meaning was: historical
knowledge which
has no universally
valid moral bearings belongs
to the
adiaphora (Pt.LIV., fn.ad. fin.).
Between
the
Kantian essays
and The Spirit of
Christianity
1798)
there
is a
gulf
so
wide that
the
later essay,writtens
it is
with suchassurance,
such
passion, and such independence of mind, may seem at f i rs t
s
if it
could
scarcely have come
f rom
the same pen. When he wrote this essay,
Hegel had come to believe that Kant was wrong not onlyabout the teach-
ing of
Jesus
and the
spirit
of the
Christian religion,
but
about religion
altogether.-He
had discovered that moral experience (about which,
s
he
continued to believe, Kantwas right)was onething,religiousexperience
(about
which
Kantwaswrong) another; thatJesuswas areligious teacher,
not
merely
a
moral
one?
and
that
an
historian's
eye was
needed
to
discern
alike
the
meaning
of
Christianity
and the
deficiencies
of
orthodoxy.
What was it that produced the revolution inHegers thinking between
what
Ihavecalled the Kantian essays and all his later works? Like other
revolutions it was not unheralded. Even in the Kantian essays there are
occasional
hints
of a
more original
line of
thought.
But
what
was it
that
led
Hegel
to
develop them,
to reorientate his
thinking,
to
renounceKants
guidance in religion,and toproduce work in a newspirit
altogether?
Some
would answer:
the
influence
of
Hlderlin.
The
answer
is
unsatis-
factory
because it would
still
be necessary to ask what it was that made
Hegel so susceptible to that influence at that
time.
The two men had
been friends for ten years at least, and
although
Hegel's poemEleusis,
addressed
to
Hlderlin,
has
been quoted s evidence that
he
shared
his
friend's
romantic
and pantheistic ideas in August 1796, it is perfectly
clear
f rom
Hegel's other contemporary writings that what
the
poem
expresses is the spiritof the addressee and not of the
author.
Contrastit,
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H
^ o fo r example, with
the
almost exactly
contemporary
diary ofbis tour in
V.the Bernese Oberland
5
). Thepoemis anearlyexample of
Hegel's
remark-
J{able skill in adopting another's point o f view and accurately describing
? i v ,
what isseen f rom it. In thediary hespeaks in propria
persona:
inEleusis
^.;, the mask he wears is Hlderlin's.
^
The
revolution
in
Hegel's thinking
came
abou-t
because, during
bis f i rs t
i e
:
two
years in
'unhappy Frankfur t
1 6
f
in
order
to eure
himself
o f melan-
diolia,he
worked
withallbis
energies
at
Greek literature
and
philosophy,
^ . r s well s at
history
and
politics,
and
theh brought
the
result
of
these
Ji
studies
to
bear
anewon the
reinterpretation
of the life andmessageof
f
Jesus.
| The root o fHegel's entire difference f rom Kant lies in this reorienta-
ition
of his
thought
in
Frankfurt. Kant
was not
much
interested
in the
Greek philosophers, and he wasmoredevoted to physical sciencethanto
history, although his essay on the latter topic showedhow alert his uni-
,
yersal
mind was to the
importance
of a new and
growing discipline.
But
henceforward
every
one of Hegel's
m a j o r
works
is
a history,
and his
philosophy owes s much
to
Plato
and
Aristotle s
to
Kant.Itwas, how-
lever, his religious insight bove all that separated him f rom Kant.His
early theologiQal writings have been called antitheologicar by an acute
critic
7
),
but this is only partly just. All these writings, especially the
later
of
them,throb with
a
religious conviction which
is
absent
f rom
Kant's
cautious
essay.
They
attack
orthodoxy
indeed, in terms similar to
those
used
by
Kant
and many other
writers
of the Aufklrung but
what Hegel
wishes
to
substitute
for
orthodoxy
is not a dry
rationalism
but a living
religious faith, carried out in practice in a
rationally
ordered
social
com-
munity.
The
basis
of
this faith
is a
doctrine
of the HolySpirit The spirit
of man,
his reason, is the oandle of the
Lord,
and its powers are thus not
subject to the
limitations which Kant
had
placed
on
them
in the first
Critique.Doubtless
these limitations
left
room
for
faith,
but unfortunately,
in
Hegel's view,
not
only
fo r
a
rational
faith
founded
on the
postulates
of
practical reason,
but also for the whole panoply of
orthodoxy,
s the
Tbingen theologians
had
quickly realised. Hegel's
eirenicon
between
faith and
reason thus depends
on
regarding reason s
free f rom
limitations,
and
it is because the self-legislating reason ofKant's ethioal works has
this
f reedom that
Hegel
never renounced their leading
principles.
II
But
was
Hegel
not a
constant
critic of the
second
Ctique?
His
published
criticisms
of Kant's ethics are directed against this workalone
amongst
Kant's writings
on the
subject,
and the chief of
them must
now
be
examined.
Haering, who
mentions
everything eise, omits this diary: nor, so far
s
I know, has any other writer on
leusis
seen that the diary is the
best commen-
tary on it.
e
Letter to
Sinclair,
mid-October
1810.
7
W - A .
K aufmann
in
Philosophiert
Review
1951,
p.
460.
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In
the
essay
on the
Scientific Ways of
Treating
Natural LawHegel's
argument
is:
Kant
argues correctly
that
practical
reason
is
concemed
with
th e
form
of
moral
action, the
correspondence
of the
form
of our
maxim
with
the
universal mo>ral law
of
duty.
The inference, however,
ought
to
be
that practical reason should content itself with saying what duty
in
general
is and
ought
not to try to
provide
a touchstone for
recognising
whatact is adutyon aparticular occasion, for Kanthadheld (K.d. .
V.
A.
589) that while pure reason could
say whait truth is in general, it
could not
provide
a test of the
truth
of any
given Statement
of
fact.
But
in relation to practical
reason,
Kant
fal ls
todraw the same
inference,
and
he
attempts (vainly,
in
Hegel's view)
to
give guidance
in
practice
by
telling us to act so that the maxim of our action can hold good s a
principle of universal
legislation;
and the commonest understanding, he
holds,
can
readily discern what
form
of
maxim
is
adapted
for
this
pur-
pose: for if Iprbpose to appropriate a deposit which is in my
hands
and |
whoseownerhad died without leaving any evidence of it, I must askmyself
whether I can legislate that everyone may deny a deposit ofwhichno
one can
produce
a
proof ,
and I
soon
see
that
I cannot. The law
would
annihilate itself,
because
if it
existed there would
be no
deposits. Hegel
points out that the argument s stated lacks cogency. ^What the non-
existence of deposits contradicts is not reason
or
the universal law, but
the
existence
ofother,
equally specific
and
limited, social
and
legal insti-
tutions,
and
only
on
some undisclosed assumption about
the
worth
of
these will
a law
leading
to the
non-existence
of
deposits
be
morally
inadmissible on
Kant's principles
(W . I. 349ff.). The
criticism,
so far s it
goes,
issound,and it is not the
least
of
Professor
H. J.
Paton's Services
to
Kant ian scholarship that he has brought out
clearly
what Kant's
assump-
tions are
8
), and expounded the totality ofKant's'ethical
teaching
and not
merely those isolated aspects
of it
which Hegel
and many
critics have
selected
for
examination.
In any event Hegers criticism here
touches
one aspect only of Kant's
doctrine and not its main principles. His
final
point in this essay is one
that he repeated
later
(W . v. 320 ff. Cf.
234, Zusatz :
moral
effort
aims
at its
own
cancellation, so that the moral will remains finite, despite
the
universality
of the
moral
law
which
it
issues.
The aim of
moral action
is to
remove
evil; but if it
succeeds there
is no
longer
any
need
for it;
diarity
constantly endeavours to remove the occasion for its exercise.
As the Dialectic of the Critique of Practical Reason
shows,
Kant was not
unaware of the
problem.
But the important point is that Hegel is not
questioning Kant's theory
of
moral experience?
he is
accepting
it and
simply
arguing that there must be a higher, experience in
wihich
its con-
tradictions
are
transcended.
The two other explicit criticisms of Kant which require attention are
those
in the
Encyclopaedia
54 and the
Philosophie des Rechts,
135.
These
are
likewise based essentially
on
passages
in the Critique
l
Practical Reason. They take no account of the Metaphysik der Sitten;
8
) The Categorical Imperative pp. 149157.
74 .
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and nowhere in
Hegel s
writings, .so fa r s I know, is
there
*any reference
al all, even implicit,t the GrundlegungderM etaphysik
der
Sitten
The
Grundlegung was published
when
Hegel was fifteen and it is not
impos-
sible that he ignored it altogether. This is un for tuna te , for
Kan t s
concep-
tion
of a
Kingdom
of Ends,
expounded
more
fully
in
that
eesay than
in his
later works, must have
interested
him, even if he may have thought it
difficult
to reconcile with some of the Statements in the second Critique
which
come in for
most
of
his criticism. Kant
has
always suffered
f rom
critics
who have failed to
realise
that he waswont to expound hisviews
gradually,beginning on a
foun dation
of common sense, an d then
modifying
Jiis starting
point bit by bit; butHegel at
least
ought to have
sympathised
with
this
method and adjusted his criticism accordingly. But thetarget of his
criticisms was precisely those elements in Kan t s doctrine which had been
most
popularised
by
Fichte
an d
which therefore
had become commonplace
in the literature of
Hegel s
own day;
these
criticisms of his appeared
(1821 and
1827) between
30 and 40
years af ter
the
publication
of the
second Crilique Nowhere does Hegel
profess
to expound
Kan t s
ethics
s
a
whole
9
]
or to subject the
whole
of his writings on this subject to
detailed examination.
Nevertheless,itmustbe admitted that in these passages in hispublish-
ed
works, Hegel
is less
than
fa ir to Kant ,
unless
he
uses Kan t s
name
simply to describe certain views which his contempcraries had come to
regard
s
the kernel of his master s teaching. The brden of
Hegel s
criticism is that although Kant was right to emphasise the pure
uncondi-
tioned self-determination of the will s he root of duty, he could n ot
extract
f rom his formulae an y
doctrine
of determinate
duties, Thus
he
had to
throw away
all he had
gained
in
superseding eudaemonism by
reducing
ethics to an empty
formalism
and the pieaching of duty for
duty s sake.
Inorder to justify this
criticism
a
critic
would
have
to plead
that Hegel
was
dealing only with
the
second Critique that
he was
attadiing great
importance
to
Kant s
own
preference
for
the
first
formulation
of the
categorical imperative,
and
that
he was
taking some
of
Kant s Statements
a t their face value without considering their context or what
modification
they
received in other contexts. The
plea
would be an admission that
justice was not being done to the many-sidedness of Kant s doctrine, but
it
would
be
doing less than justice
to
Hegel s attitude
to
Kan t s ethics
to
suppose that these criticisms
represent
it adequately. To discover what
his attitude is, it is necessary to look at other passages in Hegel where
the
relation between
the mora l
consciousness
and the
religious,
and
be-
tween
Moralitt
an d
Sittlichkeit
comes to the fore, an d others again
(un~
published in his lifetime) in whidi he expounds his own moral doctrine.
) The History of
Philosophy
might have been expected to contain such an
exposition, but the second Critique is the only one of Kant s ethical writings
whidi
it mentions.
Hegel s
criticisms
there
are in
substance
s imar to
those
summarised
in the
following paragraph.
.
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III
In the
Enc. Logic
234
there
is adirect transition from morality, ex-
pounded
mainly
s
Kant
had
expounded
it, to
religion;
it is in the
latter
that the contradictions of the
f o r m e r
are resolved. The same is
true
in
the
Phenomenology
where
Hegel
Sketches, s he didlater in the Philoso-
phie des Rechts 140, the
dangers
to
which
an ethical
iridividoialism
may
be
exposed if ,
ignoring th e
complexities
o f
Kant's
teadhing, it emphasises
the individual's
mo ra l convictions alone.
But in
Enc. Phil.
d.
Geistes
50 8 ff. and in Phil.d. Rechts th e
transition
is
from morality
to
Sittlich-
keit
while religion is ahigher sphere
still.
The
difference between these
two transitions, however,
is more apparent than real, because the
diaracteristicallyHegelian conception of
Sittlichkeit
is religious in essence
and
is intelligible
only
if its religious origin and
background
is kept in
view.
Although this
conception is not explicitly taught by Hegel until 1817
(in the first
edition
of the Encyclopaedia , it is
foreshadowed
in someof
the Jena writings fifteenyears earlier, and it has its
roots
in his thinking
when he was writing
The
Spirit
of
Christianity in 1798 and liberating
himself from th e preponderating influence ofKant's view of religion.
Hegel's problem in
this
essay is to expound the
nature
and signi-
ficance of the moral teaching of
Jesus.
He begins by contrasting it with
th e
Mosaic
law
and the
teaching
of
Kant (Nohl,
262266).
The
Mosaic
lawhe
regards
s a set of
arbitrary commandswhich
might beissuedby a
master to aslave.Hetakes it for granted,
like
a
good
pupil of
Kant, that
this
heteronomy
of the human will is
below
the moral
level.
Against
purely objective commands Jesus
set
something totally -alien
to
them,
namely
the subjective in
general ,
i. e. not human
passivity
and slavery
but a unified ideal life
confirmed
-and expressed in deeds. W e might
have expected h im , Hegel writes (i. e. if we were Kantians, convinced
by the
Religion
essay)
f
to show that any ought,
qua
a product of reason
s the capacity for universality, loses its positivity and heteronomy, so
that the thing commanded is
revealed
s grounded in an
autonomy
of
the
human
will'.But by
this line
of
argument, positivity
is
only partially
removed.
Kant had contrasted the slavery of obedience to
ritual
com-
mands with
th e freedom of the man who
listens
to his own c o m m a n d of
duty.But the difference is
really
between tw okinds o fslavery;
tihe former
has his lord outside himself while the latter carries his lord in himself,
yet is at the
same time
his own
slave.
One whowished to
restore
man's
humanity
in its
entirety could
not
possibly
have
taken
a
course like
this; for the individual would be torn against
himself ;
the cleavage
between inclination
and
reason would
not be healed.
What
Hegel
is
saying here
is not that
Kant's
analysis of
duty
and
moral experience is mis taken, but that there is an experience of a differ-
ent
kind which
'transcends it. In the
Kantian conception
o f
virtue
the
Opposition
between universal
and
particular
remains, the one s
master
th e
other
s
mastered.
Jesus
Supplements
th e deficiency of the law
r
or
fulfils it, by a
unification
of law and inclination in love? or s Hegel
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o f
the
truth of the human will...
Love
is itself away above mora l con-
siderations:Mary anoints Christ instead of giving to the
p o o r
r
and Christ
approves .
For Kant, however, this sphere above morality is beyond the
reach
of
human reason,
and
man's will
can
never become
the
holy will
in
which
there
is a complete coincidence between inclination and
law;
while for
Hegel
the
scope
of
reason
is
wider
and
man's ability
to rise
above morality is greater. In his view it is open to man to
rise
above
the
moral experience typified
by
ought
there
is
amorallaw
and man
ought to school himself to obey it to the is , the experience in which
man
lives the law instead of being tmder it
12
). Against all attempts
to base morality on sentiment, or to
justify
the subjective dictates of
anindividual
conscience, however unschooled,Hegel always
uses
Kantian
arguments. But, although he accepts the cleavage between Law and
Morality which
is
vital
to the
Metaphysik
der
Sitten
he
believes
he can
point to human experiences in which this cleavage is overcome and a
higher synthesiscan and ought to be achieved.
Amongst
the experiences which Hegel might adduce are marriage and
a man's attitude
to his
Professional calling (Letter
to
Niethammer,
10 October
1811).
The basis o f a
true
marriage (i. e. of a marriage
whidi exemplifies
Sittlichkeit)
is not
love
s a
romantic feeling (for that
may
perish
and
the marriage will be dissoluble) no r ,
s
Kant had supposed, a contract,
but a
fusion
o f
love
and
duty
in a
reverence
for an
eternal ideal.
The
parties are then so devoted to their
union
that the individuality of both
is
transcended
in a
living relationship wherein duties
are
fulfilled without
any
thought
o f them. Inclination and law are perfectly coincident Phil,
d.
Rechts.
161
ff.).
A
similar coincidence
may
occur
in the life o f a
Professional man,
s
it doubtless did in Hegel's o wn experience of his Professional work. A
mein utterly devoted
to a
cause
or an
Institution does
not
spare himself;
his day to day
duties come before
him
s
the
ordinary routine
of his
affairs
and he
carries them
o ut
selflessly,
cheerfully,
devotedly.
His in-
clinations chime
in
with
his
duties
so
that
he
fulfils
them
single-mindedly?
there is no tension, no awareness o f Oppos ing inner forces'. There may
well
be no
consciousness
o f
ought
1
'
at all
until
his
strength
fails and
he is tempted of the
devil
to
idleness,
or
until courage sinks
and he feels
God- forsaken.
Moreover,
his
devotion
to his
cause,
or
Institution,
is not
merely the bringing into being o f what ought to
existj
his activity,
animated
by this
devotion,
is at the
same time
the
existence
of the
cause,
the maintenance of the Institution.
'Ought'
1
has given place to is .
Mere devotion to a calling,
however,
is. not enough; there
must
be
devotion to an ideal of goodness which transcends it. Hegel is trying to
describe
an
experience which
is
moral
and
more ,
not an
experience with-
out a
moral content. Hitler
may
have
had
devotion such s
has
just
been described,*but that does no t exempt him f rom moral blame. The
point of
Hegel's
teaching, and we have seen that there are similar hints
12
) E. Weil in Deucalion 5 (Neuciiatel,
1955)
p.
106.
78
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inKant , isthat it is theloveof God.which transforms the moral
conscious-
ness
ofIhe individualand makes.it possible
for him
to rise to the fusion
of
inclination
and
law
in
devotion
to a supra-individual
end.
Although Kan t
w asprepared to see in thelove of God
Ihe complement.
of
duty
r
nevertheless,
in the
Professional devotion which
has
just been
described
he
saw
tw o dangers: Suppose that such a devotee were asked
whether
he did what he did because he enjoyed it or because it was
bis duty. He might reply that he did it
from
mere love oforder. In that
event
he wouldbe
thinking
that he was above the thought of duty,
like
a volunteer, s if he wanted to do of his ow n pleasure what he needed
;n o
command to do.This would be to forget the discipline ofreason and
to pretend to be
sovereign
in the
Kingdom
of Ends, not merelya subject
in it. On the other
band,
he
might reply that
he did his
work
for the
love
of God, in
fulfilment
of
God's will.
In
that event,
he
might
be claiming
holiness,
a perfect
purity
of
will
and disposition, and
this would
be a
self-conceit readily leading to a religious fanaticism. The only safe route
for
man to follow is to recognise his finitude and hislimitations and take
the moral law s the only guide in his conductThe proper moral con-
dition whichhe can and outjht to attain is virtue, not holiness
13
).The
argument
is typical of
Kant's 'caution
andhumility.
It
might
be
possible
to be less
cautious without being
less humble,
if it be less caiutious to accept more of the Gospel than Kant did. Hegel
did accept
more,
but he may not have been humble
enough.
In criticising
the passage in the Critique oi Practical Reason
from
whidi I have just
been quoting, Hegel points
out
(Nohl,
p.
267) that Kant's exegesis
of the
Gospel command Love God, and they neighbour s thyself res-ts on
taking this command out of its religious context and treating it s a
merely moral precept. And we have already seen how Hegel, by writing
a Life of
Jesus
on Kantian lines, had come to realise that
Kant
w as
mistaken in
endeavouring
to twist the moral teaching of
Jesus
into the
teadiing
of the categorical imperative. To this insight Hegel held fast.
He clings also,
s
has already been said, to his doctrine of the
Holy
Spirit, The
Kingdom of God iswithin you .He can thus hold that when
man elevates
himself
to the
Christian
religion orto the
philosophy which
expounds explicitly the contentofthat religion,the
chasm
between trans-
cendence and imm anenceisbridged,and he attainsunityandlivessingle-
mindedly Enc. 234,
Zusatz)
in the rational order which is
from ever-
lasting toeverlasting and inwhich all men find fll satisfactionby living
its
laws.
In other words this ethical liie
u
is the Kingdom of God on
earth.This
is the key to
Hegel's
conception
of
Sittlichkeit.
For Kant the Kingdom ofEnds remains an
ideal?
but fo r Hegel it is
being
progressively
actualised in the process of
history.
along
with
the
progress
of the human spirit. Plato's Republic describes the rational
order
in the
form
in
which
it was
actualised
in
Greece
and so
portrays
the essential
substance
of Greek moral and political
life
(W .VIII. 17).
Since his day
f
owing
chiefly
to the Christianrevelation,man has
advanced
K.p.V.
PL l
III,
von den Triebfedern der
r.p.V.,
ad fin.
79.
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in
self-knowledge;
in particular he has come to recognise himself s an
individual, s
a self-legislating
moral
will. The forms of his social
life
have changed accordingly; his deeper
knowledge
of himself is also a
deeper knowledge of what the rational social order, or Kingdom of
Ends
is. And
this knowledge Hegel expounds
in the
third
part
of the
Philosophie des
Rechtswhere
the
state described
is no
existing state
but
the rational
substance
ofpolitical life in the world ofHegel's day. Thus
far has consciousness
advanced
(W. IX. 546). Further advances willreveal
new
aspects
of the
ideal,
and
pari passu
the
ideal will
be
actualised
anew in a higher form still. Deeper
self-knowledge
is at the same time
a deeper knowledge of the will of God -and it is.achieved step by step
along with the
further
realisation of God's purpose on earth. Hegel's
conception
of
Sittlichkeit
might thus be described s a philosophical
distillation
of a religioois
insight into
the
Kingdom
o f
God.
The
Kingdom
of Ends is not an ideal
towards
which we ought.to struggle
ad
infinitum
without ever reaching it; it is already present s the rational essence of
social and political
life,
so that, given religious
faith
or philosophical
insight, we can live within it here and now.
Nevertheless
it seems plain that it is for religious
faith
-alone that
ought
gives
place to is , and
then
only fitfully. Hegel seeks to out-
soar the limitations ofhuman life and to live in arealm where all conflict
has been
overcome,
but can he succeed? Consider,
for
example, one of
the
contradiotions
which
he finds in
moral experience;
the
categorical
imperative isUniversal, while,a given duty is particular, and there may
be difficulty in deciding what precise act here and now is our duty,
because duties m ay
confliot Enc.
508).
Kemt
did not overlook the
problem, but his treatment of it is more
bold
than convincing: Two
opposite
rules
cannot be necessary at the same time, but if it is a duty
to act
according
to one of them it is
then
inconsistent
with duty
to act
according to the other; i t follows that a conflict of duties is in-
conceivable
14
). Even if it be granted that one act and one only is m y
duty
in a
given
Situation,
so
that
one
rule
and one
mle
only
is
necessary
therein, Ka n t is not telling us how on his principles we ought to decide
in a given Situation which of two maxims, both conformable to the
categorical imperative, we are to adopt if t h e Situation is such that we
cannot act on
both,
though it is situations of this kind which give rise
to the most
acute
moral perplexity, It may be
held
that the task of a moral
philosopher
is to say
what duty
is and not to
teil
me
what
my
duty
is
here and now, but is this answer open to Kant who said that no far-
reaching penetration
is
required
to
discover what
my
duty
is: I
have
but
to ask
myself
whether I can will that my
maxim
should also be a uni-
versal
law?
15
).
The difficulty may be
specially acute
for
Kant
who may
have over-
emphasisedthe
place
of
,rule or
law in
ethics.
But it may be
asked whether
the difficulty is.^ny less acute
for
Hegel. In a
perfect
world the conflict
of duties which is characteristic of moral experience m ay disappear, but
14
) Metaphysik
der
Sitten
Pt.
l.Einleitung in die Md.S.,
IV.
)
e.g. Grundlegung section I, and K.p.V. I. I. 4.
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even
if
marriage
and a
Professional oalling provide instances
of an ex-
perience in
whidi law
and inclination coincide and the
thought
of
duty
vanishes, m ay these
tw o
spheres
not conflict? In this imperfect
world
emergencies
occur
-and in one of
them
Professional duty may have to
be
sacrificed
on the
altar
of
marital
duty
r
or
vice versa.
In
such
an emer-
gency is vanishes -and ought reappears.
Hegel
knew
this perfectly
well,
even if
his published writings often
give
a different
impression.
His
conception
ofSittlichkeitderives, I
have
been arguing, from
the
essay
on The
Spirit
o
Christianity,
and the final
sentence of
that
essay reads (Nohl, 342):The fate in this world of the
ideal which Jesus taught is that Church and State
r
worship and life,
piety and virtue,
spiritual
and mundane action, can never dissolve into
cne .
In
other
words,
the
fusion of
morality with religion
in a
higher
sphere
of Sittlichkeit
remains
an
ideal.
The
saint
and the
philosopher,
however
confident
their
faith or profound
their
insight,
are
still
human
beings, and the world in which human beings
live
is not the world of
Hegel's Wirklichkeit but the
imperfect
and often
irrational world
of
ReaJifi.
However happy Hegel
was in his family
circle
or in his
pro-
fessional
work
r
however well ordered his
life
in these spheres, however
secure
his religious faith and however
unruffled,
in his study, his
philo-
sophic calm, the world of
Realitt
pressed hardly
enough
on him when
he left his study for the University ofBerlin and
found
himself involved
in difficulties
with colleagues
s
unloving
s
they were irrational. When
more than one
privat-docent
of his
acquaintance
was
dismissed
by the
government
s
politically suspect, Hegel was far
from
resigned and far
from inactive.
And his
action
was on the
plane
of Moralitt. In the
last
resort Sittlichkeit
remains for him just s rnuch an ideal s the
Kingdom
of
Ends
did for Kant , and it is an
ideal
of the
same sort,
one
with
a
religious basis. No doubt the ideal was present in the real world
s
its
essential
substance,
but
could
Kant
not
have s-aid
the
same about
the
Kingdom of Ends, which after all was not merely a far-off divine event
but an
operative
ideal
in the
midst
of
human society? Hegel
might
say
that Kant,
like
Moses,
only
saw the
promised land,
while he
himself
lived in it As
philosopher
or
believer
he may
have done,
but in
practical
ffairs
and in education he was well enough aware that
imperfection
existed
and ought to be
11
removed. Kants ethics
had not
been
trans-
cended,
still less
discarded;
This is nowhere more clear than in Hegel's educational practice, it
is
here that
his
dependence
on
Kant's ethics
is
most obvious
and most
complete.
When
his fiancee had to be
taught that happiness
was not
man's
diief
aim,
he addressed a long letter to her
which,
s
Glckner
Hegel, L
309)says would
do
honour
to
any Kantian .
As
Rector
of the
Gymnasium
a t Nrnberg,
he
taught philosophy
to his
pupils,
and his
lecture notes have
survived.
The seyenty printed pages (W.
XV IIL
376)
summarising
his instruction to the JuniorClassonLaw,
Duty,
andR eligion
contain the longest and the
clearest
exppsition which he has provided
of his ethics. But for their conciseness they might almost have been
written
by the
author
of the
Metaphysik der Sitten